Mother Fish (New!)
Joe Rosenblatt
Ink and pastel
8 x 9.75 in.
Value: $420.00
Rental per month: $9.00
Poet-painter Joe Rosenblatt was born in Toronto in l933. He started writing seriously in the early sixties, and in l966 his first book, The L.S.D. Leacock, was published by Coach House Press. Since then he has published more than a dozen books of poetry and fiction complete with his own illustrations. His selected poems (1962-1975), Top Soil, won the Governor-General's Award for poetry. Another volume of selected poems, (l963-l985), Poetry Hotel, won The B.C. Book Prize, l986 for poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals in North America. Rosenblatt has held several writer-in-residence positions in Canadian universities and libraries, as well as short term writer-in-residence positions at the University of Rome and University of Bologna. Between l987 and l993 he toured Europe giving readings and lectures in Italy, Sweden and Finland. Illustrated by the poet, a bilingual edition of his sea sonnets Madre Tentacolare (A Tentacled Mother), was translated into Italian by the late Prof. Alfredo Rizzardi of the University of Bologna and published in Italy. In 1996 Toronto's Exile Press released A Tentacled Mother in the original along with his selected prose and poems, The Rosenblatt Reader. A collection of his selected drawings and new poems, The Voluptuous Gardener, was published in 1996 by Vancouver's Beach Holme Press. Since 1980 Rosenblatt has been living in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island with his wife Faye, a piano teacher with their two surviving felines. They are depicted in his paintings and drawings which are in public and private collections in Canada.
Artist’s Statement
Lines extend from a nucleus of form. In my drawings personalities grow exactly like limbs. Just as in real life a pollywog changes into an adult amphibian, a drawing's protolimbs proliferate, gaining meatier dimensions, and bloom into a shape. Those creatures in my landscape carry my genetic material. Often I will come up with the title days after the drawing is completed. Or the reverse-a title emerges before I even start the drawing. In my mind the landscape with its intricacies is there germinating, waiting to sprout up from the cerebral soil. The drawing paper demands its form. It wants to be fed and craves for limbs. And perhaps a spiritual envelope called the soul.
J. Rosenblatt May 23, 1992