Archive
Top Five Men of the Cities
I
His tight nylon jacket
zipped to the neck, sheathing
the hues of his tautness
from the world—the
sandaled blond feet
and shaggy mane—
the only invitations to
join him at the gallery.
II
For soccer, he waits
with friends and beer,
straight from work,
the pub chair matching
pound for hard pound
the pressure of his weight,
clad in the perfect ratio
of dress-cloth gabardine
to bracing athletic flesh.
III
The glisten of his flushed skin
caught by the light
of the single, naked bulb,
his eyes as dark as
nothingness,
his lips trembling
with unintelligible
whispers, his native tongue
dangling as on a string.
IV
Towering tree of a boy,
apologizing in hard “R”
English—so
softly, gently—
for the lateness of
the food, and
secretly, the inaccessibility
of his heart.
V
His unwashed hair,
alluring beneath the woolen
workman’s cap, like
a revolutionary in tribute
to his forebears,
a ceramic doll in tribute
to the wretched
and unbathed
of the cities of the plain.
Brad Fairchild is an artist and writer living in Atlanta who wants to point out the lonely beauty in broken things. He wants to pay tribute to these inanimate souls by rendering them into something new and accessible to others. He is descended from a pirate, and that is somehow fitting.
Snapshots of the Revolution
Washington encounters the fabled Boy-faced Hart outside Valley Forge
(click to enlarge)
Mr. Jefferson’s Meteor
(click to enlarge)
Statement
I feel that my love for poetry with its fragments of imagery leads me to be a collector by nature, somehow, and then to place the disparate things I’ve discovered into a box assemblage, or digital collage, in presentation, a sort of hominoid bowerbird posing bits of blue and shiny objects it has gathered within a frame of bundled twigs. I am attracted to lovely, mostly used, distressed, castaway objects and images that I find in thrift stores, on streets, in basements, forests, yard sales, and unexpected places.
The arranged items then take on a new life: splinters of miscellanea come together as a larger, more complete fragment. They take on new meanings through their associations with one another. They suggest stories, names, titles, histories. They form an entry point into a narrative that is then conveyed to the viewer to direct or expand on as their own experiences and imaginations lead them.
Working with these fragments, I am reminded that there is rarely such a thing as The Complete. And that great potential lies in this incompleteness, and great beauty lies in the unknown and untold.
The Small is part of the Large. The Piece is part of the Whole. The Unseen is part of the Beautiful.
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Brad Fairchild is an artist and writer living in Atlanta who wants to point out the lonely beauty in broken things. He wants to pay tribute to these inanimate souls by rendering them into something new and accessible to others. He is descended from a pirate, and that is somehow fitting.
qarrtsiluni 