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The Artist

from Inhuman Resources by Tom Kingsley

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about

The mostly-true story of my photographic exhibition at The Mission Gallery, at Swansea Docks, in 1980. (It was a repurposed sea-man's chapel).

lyrics

The Artist (1980)

He was painting the gutter of Wind Street,
like a Jackson Pollack, in bile.
His bitterness twisting his insides,
on his outside the ghost of a smile.
His show had been on at The Mission
where his pictures had sold like Van Gogh's
& along with the plaudits & back-bites
he'd received twenty-seven fuck-offs.
His vision was fine, ‘til he'd shared with the world
what had made his heart sing at first sight,
now he just sees in dull greys and blacks swirled
round occasional pinpricks of light.
He'd been framed & mounted, that last, from behind.
He'd been strung up & hung out to dry,
but his blacks had been blacker than all the reviews
and his highlights too bright for the eye.
They'd all drunk the free wine that had flowed from the font
of his Altruists' Church of The Arts,
Where, an hour ago, they'd had Zeitgeist in spades,
now they'd all become Philistine farts.
He's unsung, undiscovered, and misunderstood
and a light year ahead of his time.
For the talentless blind he's a talent too good
and a pearl that's been cast before swine.
Yes, an artist he was, and an artist will be,
through a change from the fine to the rough,
but his category still begins with a 'P',
where the pavement is canvas enough.

credits

from Inhuman Resources, released September 5, 2022
Tom Kingsley - vox; Andy Fung - drums & BV; Frank Naughton - keyboards & bass; Paul Battenbough - guitar & BV.

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all rights reserved

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about

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Tom Kingsley Newport, UK

Tom Kingsley (aka Brian Phillips) has been a poet for 50yrs and thinks he might just be getting the hang of it. Always trying to look at life, even the grotesques and gargoyles of the world, with humour, he hopes to bring about regime change, revolution, and the salvation of nature by scribbling a few words and then singing or reciting them into that new fangled gramaphone contraption. Iechyd da. ... more

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