Two Shots and More by Merlin Flower
cleaner just dropped it and swept it away.’ ‘But who has curated the exhibition?’ someone asks in a shrill tone as they move from the stark surreal canvases to jauntily coloured pictures of folk figures from the fifties: ‘Why isn’t it chronological? Surely these are earlier pictures?’ ‘It’s thematic and generic,’ her companion says. ‘Can’t you see? These are Marya’s watercolours.’
Scorpions in the desert sand. Cactus trees in an empty city street. Strange-shaped skulls, bones on empty beaches. A purple-skinned woman with three heads and three star-nippled breasts. An ephebic boy dancing with a dinner-jacketed skeleton. A woman, naked, staring at a long wild cat with a humanoid face. Charcoal sketches. Paintings blanched of colour. A deft, lightly-coloured sketch of a man kneelThese are the paintings from England that ing, his bleeding head held in his hands. In the background, hazy figures of a throng. It’s called The she’s best known for today. Stoning of the Heretic, 1960. You can recognise a
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