Thursday, November 14, 2013

Street Legal

We were riding fast with all the windows open heading for that slice of horizon just between sky and mountain were freedom collides with inexcusable containment frozen in concrete limitations of social expression while the road disappears at the edge of vision and we are riding street legal with all the tricks as the asphalt singed the rubber and the radio crackled news of reasons to never turn back and you only have so many years to reach the space where the shackles of reality can’t touch you before it ends again and you have to start all over again and the gas gauge drops another notch while the horizon stays just beyond reach like a rainbow hiding a pot of gold and we sing all the songs we can remember the lyrics or make up our own and let the wind carry the damage of living too fast too free and somewhere in a dream of splash right before the street united the hard won experience of knowing better but never caring with a touch of bittersweet wisdom that you only go around once before you go around again and the wheels keep turning and the sky keeps yawning deep blue sparks of horizon into the ghetto mind of carnival sideshow sensory gratification while the Candy Man just smiles from his rocking chair by the door and the lucky get what they need and the sky dreams of black and white reality airplanes looking for love while the pencil marks render dark smudges of motion beneath a white stick of oil pastel and the ink marks the space between centrifugal motion of brush and surface splash again the paper as the pigment of watercolor sings of going up Third and cutting across Vine which can’t happen any longer or at least not in downtown Knoxville where they destroyed the waterfront where the black people used to set up for market and the Candy Man left for Venus on a freight train heading south and all the bored and frustrated housewives have hope that the Candy Man will come back and give them that treat of excitement again but the road keeps singing and the street songs keep flowing past the gutter and into nothing beyond the empty silence of what is and what will be isn’t how it was any more and the fingers smudge the greens and blues of freedom into a sky above purple mountains as the fuel gauge blinks an E


Oliver Loveday © November 14, 2013 5:20pm EST

“Street Legal”
Pencil, conté crayon, charcoal, pastel, oil pastel, watercolor and ink
12 x 9 inches | 30.5 x 22.9 cm | 50 lb acid free Canson paper
November 6, 2013

"Street Legal" video of the creation of the art work.

For more information about the work of Oliver Loveday, visit Loveday Studio.

2 comments:

  1. loved seeing the work and the result. Art seems so simple when you see it, but the mind that creates this is what forms the artist and this artwork.

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