Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2007SYR16
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Poem Inspiration Location
Like Art's Alchemy
poster information
Description
Like art's alchemy
Landmark theater can mold
Stage performance gold
I grew up in Solvay, and used to go to the Landmark when it operated as Lowes State Theater. The place was built at the end of the “roaring '20s” and was once a fabulous spectacle of stage show grandeur. But when I was going there, it was just a dark, dingy “has been” movie theater. By 1975, the lack of interest and attention had brought Lowes to what appeared to be its final curtain.
Upon returning to the Syracuse area after college in the late '70s I went to what had become the Landmark Theater to see the musical “Hair.” The transformation was astonishing. The refurbished murals seemed to drip gold. The splendor was back!
So my haiku suggests that it's only something as powerful as art—in this case, the performing arts—that can transform the common or the grim inevitable into something special...something GOLDEN!
I've lived in the Syracuse area my whole life, but I'd only been to the Landmark on three or four occasions. I went there as a child and possibly as a teenager on field trips. The first time I walked in, the interior was like nothing I expected. I was really surprised by just how decorated the entire place is.
So for this project, I wanted to take advantage of the decoration, and try to capture it in pen and ink. At first I tried colored inks, but that just over-complicated the image. So then I went back to my reference pictures, and looked through the entire set, which totaled 70 to 80 pictures. I ended up using the same image, but this time I broke down the shapes, so I could see it better, then did the final image in black. I'm quite happy with it.