Woman on Checkerboard
August 21, 2016
After emboldening myself I approach “Woman and Checkerboard” and say, “Ma’am, you appear rather morose this morning.”
“Is that a surprise? While molten blue eyes pour out my sockets I’m sitting at a table threatened by a gloomy wall and ominous sky and sense Richard Diebenkorn’s going to remove me and other people from his scenes. Imagine where he’ll put us.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Museums and wealthy collectors will pay to hang you and your friends in beautiful galleries and living rooms while, for almost twenty years, Diebenkorn provides bright company from the Ocean Park series south of Santa Monica.”
“Men and women like me?”
“No, large abstract landscapes in gentle blues and light blues and soft purples and browns and succulent yellows and oranges and soothing off-whites divided and joined by lines in scenes more congenial than you, his figurative subjects, have seen.”
“I hope he likes the sea more than people.”
“Artistically, at least, I believe he does.”
“Then maybe he’ll relax and stop smoking.”
Recent Commentary
Books
George Thomas Clark combines history and creative writing to enliven stories about fascinating people and events. In Hollywood Heartache, talented but disturbed actor Robert Walker is brilliant in front of the camera but tormented in his private life, and beautiful Joan Bennett is a popular actress until her film career is destroyed by scandal, Mass…
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HITLER HERE is a well researched and lyrically written biographical novel offering first-person stories by the Fuehrer and a variety of other characters. This intimate approach invites the reader to peer into Hitler’s mind, talk to Eva Braun, joust with Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler, debate with the generals, fight on land and at sea and…
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Art history and fiction merge to reveal the lives and emotions of great painters Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, William H. Johnson, Lee Krasner, and many others.
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In this collection of thirty-eight chiseled short stories, George Thomas Clark introduces readers to actors, alcoholics, addicts, writers famous and unknown, a general, a lovelorn farmer, a family besieged by cancer, extraterrestrials threatening the world, a couple time traveling back to a critical battle, a deranged husband chasing his wife, and many more memorable people…
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Available now in a single digital-only volume of four books: Echoes from Saddam Hussein, Obama on Edge, King Donald, and Down Goes Trump. In his signature style, George Thomas Clark combines satire and creative writing to illuminate many historic developments this century. Echoes from Saddam Hussein – Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush candidly explain their need to control the…
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