Great Art and ways of seeing great art.  Unusual happenings and strange accidents can unlock a painting so that all at once it will speak to you  - sometimes,  like in this piece,  it can be a whole gallery full of them…

THE OLD MASTERS

These Art Museums often seem lustreless,

sterile and as impersonal as mausoleums:

they could never have been what the great

Master Painters would have wished or wanted.

Their marvels screwed into the very walls;

incarcerated anyway under layers

of glaze and slowly-darkening varnish.

Yet unexpectedly,  bizarrely,  today,

a gaggle of unseen, journeyman decorators

have flooded the gallery with the alien reek

of fresh, new paint. A suppressed coughing

ripples the disturbed air and heralds stranger

metaphysical transformations: for parched

pigments on scores of antique canvasses,

arid oils on old wood panels exhale

a sustained,  but distinctly audible,  sigh.

And now, the Old Masters themselves,

- invisible in adjoining studios or chambers –

bend once more over kettles of oak-tree bark

and bovine urine. There’s the sound

of lapis lazuli,  no doubt,  being smashed

and ground down to a vivid dust;

the preparation of linseed and walnut oils.

They habitually draw together into pairs

or groups to share good news; review

fortuitous innovations, techniques and tricks,

and thus conspire – in that stimulating stench

of wood-smoke, piss and stale hoof-glue -

to delight, to move and utterly astonish you.