His canvases sagged with decay,
.
each a small shrine to imperfection, dereliction
infecting its seams and squares, left brittle
.
and opens, oils a fecund messenger.
a chorus if sores in line. It had to fester, like
.
damaged flesh, and drink from this corrupt well.
All the world was simply vaudeville.
*
His bankruptcy was inevitable.
What market is there for such things?
Ruin is not a commodity so much
.
as a global condition. Unnecessary
to be so reminded, ruin arriving for each of us.
Set aside for sufficient time.
*
There is a poetry of despair, a paean
to blotched faces and rotten meat.
.
That was not his style.
He sought the itch of existence, the very point
.
where life went off, irretrievably,
and lost its balance.
.
What he thought of as the honesty of disintegration.
.
– Tom Weston, ‘Painting the fall’, in Small Humours of Daylight (Wellington: Steele Roberts & Associates, 2008).
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