Poets, Painters and Photographers

Cross-media explorations open at the Piante Gallery

(Oct. 1, 2009) It began with the notion of auctioning off a poem. A friend had asked poet/filmmaker Anthony Lucero if he might contribute one of his poems for a benefit auction she was putting together.

“I told her you can’t really do that,” said Lucero over lunch at his Arcata bungalow. He figured that only works by a dead poet would sell at auction. “And I wanted to be alive,” he said with a laugh.

Sennott’s monotype of a racoon illustrated with a poem by Lucero.

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Instead he decided to find a collaborator, an artist who could create some sort of piece to accompany his words and create something akin to a broadside. He found one in Carol Andersen, an Arcata painter probably best known for her whimsical paintings of animals. Dancing foxes and birds that seem to smile at you leap from the large sheets of paper she works on, suggesting illustrations for some unknown story.

Lucero gave her a couple of short poems. One touched on bees; the other was a three-line epigram:

fairy on the back

of a crow

makes an angel

“I ran over to my studio and I only had a little while to paint,” Andersen recalled. “I’m usually so meticulous, but those [two pieces] just came right out of me. And people loved them.”

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