THE GIRL WITH THE TECHNICOLOR SMILE

By ton.car

Thu, 14 Jun 2012
  • 713 reads
4 comments
 

If Jackson Pollock
Could spray a dollop
On a canvas twelve feet wide
He still wouldn’t catch
The style and panache
Of the girl with the Technicolor smile.

Old masters tear their hair out
Seek to emulate and replicate
William Blake tried and failed
Chagall thought he’d got it made
Edvard Munch was out to lunch
Sir Henry Moore got shown the door
They hadn’t got the skill or style
To capture the girl with the Technicolor smile.

Andy Warhol, what a scream
Roy Lichtenstein belongs in comic books
And Mona Lisa, that old teaser
Can’t hold a candle to this girls looks.
While Lawrence Stephen Lowry
With his rent collectors bile
Trudged the back streets of Salford
In search of the girl with the Technicolor smile.

Rembrandt, Rubens, Vermeer and Hals
Full of fancy Flemish baroque
While Giotto and Cimabue, all Gothic Medieval
Were nothing but a lousy joke.
Lucien Freud became annoyed
And Van Gogh he turned vile
As Edward Hopper came a cropper
Trying to paint the girl with the Technicolor smile.

Richard Hamilton – Pop Art guru
Imagined her as dollar bills
Cindy Sherman – retro stylist
Replicated movie stills
While Georgia O’Keefe was beyond belief
Mark Rothko missed by a mile
Paul Cezanne is now half a man
Because of the girl with the Technicolor smile.

Rene Magritte, while a favourite of mine
And up there with Ford Maddox Brown
Considered a king among artists
Will never be wearing the crown
Cubist, Post-Modern and plain Art Nouveau
The Bloomsbury Group, though somewhat aloof
And considered the top of the pile
Virginia Wolfe emitted a gulp
At the girl with the Technicolor smile.

Bauhaus, Expressionist, Early Renaissance
Couldn’t come close to catching her aura
Romantics, Surrealists and Byzantine theorists
Promised so much but eventually bored her
Painters and poets and students of culture
Writers, philosophers, creators of sculpture
Come to my door and beg for the answer
Shelley the dreamer, Nijinsky the dancer
Shakespeare the playwright lost for a rhyme
Apologised profusely for committing the crime
And said ‘ I’d swap her for Juliet any old time’
That girl with the Technicolor smile.

Certificate U
Poem
Words For A Rainy Afternoon
Humour

Comments

Submitted by thanksforthepar... on
Lovely :)

 

Submitted by ton.car on
Thanks. Poetry isn't exactly my strong point but I thought I'd give it a go after listening to John Cooper Clarke on the radio. I opened a book on the history of art and just started writing. I read your story about the two elderly lovers and it's an excellent take on an age old subject.

Submitted by Parson Thru on
Brilliant! Was there a nod to Bowie in there? Everything is linked. Just read a photocopy of a Guardian interview with JCC. "Everyone who saw the Velvets formed a band / people who heard JCC's poetry became poets" (badly paraphrased). There you go then!

Parson Thru

Submitted by ton.car on
I composed it while walking my dog through the local woods. There wasn't a soul in sight so I was able to adopt a dodgy Salford accent and belt it out at full volume.The birds seemed to dig it....