While I’m buried in marking and moderating and things are relatively quiet here, I thought I’d put up a page I’ve kept under wraps for a while. One of my areas of limerick writing (which itself has been pretty quiet lately) is a series of brief biographies of fine artists. When I was writing most of them in 2006 I intended to do enough to cover a representative sample, from Ansel Adams to Zurburán, and collect them into a small book aimed at museum and gallery shops, with each limerick and biographical note facing a page showing one of the artist’s key works. In early 2007 I approached some publishers with a book proposal along those lines called There Was an Old Artist from Ghent, and hit the usual wall of indifference facing any author of light verse.
Because of these plans I kept the limericks in question out of my own pages, although they were all at the OEDILF as usual. Five years later I have to admit that the idea isn’t going anywhere soon, so rather than leave them on the hard drive or bury them in other pages I thought I’d put them on display here.
There was an old artist from Ghent
Who loved painting wherever he went.
His colours were fine
And his subjects divine—
Once you knew what the devil they meant.
23 May 2012