Sardines and Oranges - from the "Voices and Visions" Fort Mason Printmakers portfolio

Mireille Morency-Lay

From the portfolio of 22 etchings by 22 artists, titled "Voice and Visions: A Book of Poems and Etchings." Printed by the Fort Mason Printmakers in San Francisco under the direction of Eleanor Rappe, each work was inspired by a poem of the artist's choice, corresponding to their assigned category: Part I, Of Love and Loss; Part II, Upon the Earth; Part III, Under the Heavens; Part IV, Journeys of the Mind; and Part V, Metamorphoses.

This print is from the fifth category: Metamorphoses. Its corresponding poem was "Why I Am Not a Painter" by Frank O'Hara:

I am not a painter, I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not. Well, / for instance, Mike Goldberg / is starting a painting. I drop in. / "Sit down and have a drink" he / says. I drink; we drink. I look / up. "You have SARDINES in it." / "Yes, it needed something there." / "Oh." I go and the days go by / and I drop in again. The painting / is going on, and I go, and the days / go by. I drop in. The painting is / finished. "Where's SARDINES?" / All that's left is just / letters, "It was too much," Mike says. / But me? One day I am thinking of / a color: orange. I write a line / about orange. Pretty soon it is a / whole page of words, not lines. / Then another page. There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by. It is even in / prose, I am a real poet. My poem / is finished and I haven't mentioned / orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call / it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery / I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.