Watching Alec Guinness, again, in Kind Hearts
And Coronets, the premise: he plays nearly everyone;
I thought: that’s wicked, to find parts
So varied (not all men, some foreigners), and so many of them.
I wasn’t bored, but watching again it held no surprises,
And the Edwardian (or late Victorian) disguises, and boarding
Houses must have got inside me; I too felt like lording.
I picked up my iPad, which lay beside me
On a heavy volume of art through the ages.
I opened the drawing app, and the book.
No conscious choice was made. I didn’t look again or falter,
Found Ennui, to copy briskly, somewhere in those pages,
And adding messy hair and specs I figured I took
Possession of that picture, by Sickert, Walter.
That was the first of my Portraits of the Artist in a ________, drawn in March 2021. I wrote about the first few at the time. The poem came the following year, the first of nine.
I’m now putting the pictures together as a book: A Speccy Man’s History Of Art.