How to Paint

Winner of the 2006 Wick Chapbook Award from the Wick Poetry Center and Kent State University Press (2007).

A collection of poems that meditates on the spirit through the medium of visual art.

Jason Gray ends his sequence “Meditation of the Tomb Painters” with the lines: “Here is my heart in paint a stowaway/ Inside the art that only God would see.” And indeed, in all of Gray’s work there is a sense that the heart, the faithful and abiding heart, is best (and most safely) transported via the artifice of poetry. From the heart-wrenching blank verse ekphrastic “My Daughter as the Angel Gabriel…” to the heartily clever nonce “You Put Your Right Hand In…,” this is work that is always worshipful of its medium.

Kathy Fagan

The ekphrastic poems in How to Paint the Savior Dead celebrate and enact the power of words to exhume a living body—a human’s or a god’s—from the stilled depths of the painted image. Jason Gray, a chiaroscurist—drawn to the drama at the border between light and dark, the seen and the hidden, and the sacred and the profane—writes wisely, wryly, wonderfully, and at times, wickedly about the “common beauty” of the quotidian and the “mundane miracle” of the divine.

Eric Pankey

from How to Paint the Savior Dead

Y o u r A r t H i s t o r y

i. First Lesson

The first thing I ever heard from you
Was how to paint the Savior dead.

I felt unseated, struck like Mary
At the angel’s visitation,

And fell in love with your voice. Here
Was prophecy: I sensed the words

Shook you as much as they shook me.
But the foretold means nothing if none

Can read what’s on the summer air
And what is not: against the dark

A flash of fireflies, a speck
Of water on the brightest day.

ii. Interpretation

Here you are the Corinthian Maid,
Trying to get your lover into the sun
To trace his shadow. Always he must go,
Always you stay. How you will learn to love
The rock you drew on when he’s gone.
Born out of need to keep at least a ghost
Of our loves, the history of art is this:
The bitter kiss of chalk left on your lips
When stone is film plate and adored.
Forget the process, love the aftertaste.

When Adam left to tend his olives,
You were left to bear his image.
His knee-high boys with jelly-covered fingers
Grasped your skirt and marked their territory.
The jelly stains were little hearts all over you.
No woman had ever been so loved, you told yourself,
And scratched a stick into the ground.

iii. Case Study (The Annunciation by Jan van Eyck)

Here she stands stained blue
And ready to divide
Into a copy of God,

Who focuses His light
Through the window-lens—her name
Projected upside-down

As if the painter knew
Years hence all newlyweds
Would be thus joined and sainted.

iv. Inspiration

Right now you are afield
Taking impossible photographs
Of a wedding—someone you
Once loved, and someone else in white.
The invitation plain
And on the level; still, you wonder
If this is a fiction you’re creating.

Look at the image reborn
In the chemical bath, the darkness drawn
Out of the white, and fixed
Forever. Though maybe some time later
You’ll find a small square emptied
Of its memories, the way her dark
Hair loosened from the veil
And spilled over the dress, his tie
Undone and hanging down
His wine-stained shirt-front as they fall
Into the car and disappear.

Go. The world is nothing
But waiting for the light to burn
All the images
Of what it will be like henceforth,
And what it used to be.
Like a ring, glinting inside the paper
The twist of silver tells us so.