“If a painting could talk”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/sep/20/art.poetry

Beginning

” we brought most of our books but left all our paintings behind. These were distributed among my brother, sisters and friends for safe-keeping or as gifts. Years later I lamented this, sorely missing these images. One painting in particular haunted me. It had been given to us by a young Guyanese artist, Keith Khan. I remembered its mysterious serenity, its warm background colours, the figure rising like a sphinx from the blue ruins of a wall. Although on visits home I looked for it several times, it wasn’t until seven years ago that I finally found it, behind a bedstead in our old family home. I brought it back with me to England, where it attests to the power of art to haunt us, to stick in the memory and nourish the spirit.

The ability of the artist to transmute paints into forms, shapes and feelings has always been a source of wonder to me. Equally fascinating is the interplay between art-forms – the way poetry, sculpture, music and painting relate to each other. I feel the relationship between painting and poetry is a particularly close one. Both come out of a desire to make something new of the familiar, to capture an experience in a living, concentrated way. Both share a harmony, structure, colour and rhythm; in the compositional balance of a painting, one can almost speak of one colour “rhyming” with another.”