Undercoat: Poems about Paintings

‘… my way of looking closely’

The Bathurst Regional Art Gallery runs an artists-in-residence program at Hill End, the goldrush town that in the late 1940s was rediscovered by painters such as Russell Drysdale and Margaret Olley. In that program Mark O’Flynn wrote poems about the paintings that had drawn inspiration from the textures and colours of the landscape. This started his passion for ekphrasis – the dialogue between visual art and poetry.

Undercoat: Poems about Paintings has three sections: Hill End Poems; Poems on Canvas; and The Human Face. These poems explore how ‘the narrative of painting, in particular, might be regarded and rendered through the lens of poetry‘. For Mark ‘my way of looking closely’.

As you read the poems you can find links to many of the paintings that inspired them in our virtual gallery.

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