Belle Koblentz | Astra Fantasy

Belle Koblentz: Astra Fantasy

Once, I was a painter, a colorist. Today, I am a photographer, a digital artist, who approaches the photo image from a painter's perspective and with a painter's vocabulary. Color is still foremost in my consideration of the elements of a piece. Nature is my muse. I transform my original photo, pushing saturation, hue, value and contrast, to abstract it from a photographic reality to a painterly space.

______________________________

Belle Koblentz is a New Jersey artist living in Colts Neck and a member of the Art Alliance of Monmouth County. She received her BA in Visual Arts and an MA in Aesthetics from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Charles Pierre | Early April Violet

Early April Violet

 

 

An ordinary shift in the chilly wind

brings this seed to sprout amid braided debris,

just above the high-water line on a beach,

where the Nissequogue River enters the Sound.

All one can see are five frail petals

on a slender stem, with no visible leaves

to cushion them in such a punishing place,

where the life of a being so small is gauged

in days, and the thin light of early April

is the only tenderness this flower will sense,

exposed on a raft of dead grasses and reeds,

bent by onshore gusts as the new moon ascends,

when a spring tide floats the violet to sea.

 

 

This poem originally appeared in the author's poetry collection, Father of Water (2008).

 

 

_________________________________

Charles Pierre was born in New York City in 1945 and raised in Centerport, New York. He studied at the University of Virginia and worked as a copywriter in Manhattan, where he has lived since 1973. Mr. Pierre is the author of five poetry collections: Green Vistas, Father of Water, Brief Intervals of Harmony, Coastal Moments, and Circle of Time.