Seagull Motif (Violet and Green)
—Arthur Dove, 1928
From the deck of the yawl, he stares at the spit of land the locals call Sand City. He fixes his gaze on a single seagull, in motion against a seascape of sunset. He sees the line she shapes long before fancy cam-eras might lapse time or layer exposure upon exposure upon exposure so that the slow-eyed human might better behold the startling swoops of a flock of starlings. Instead, he wields the brush, tracing the figure eight ribbon she unfolds as she glides. He wants to get closer to the sensation of flight. He wants to find ways to use paint to extract the essence of the bird whose element is all edge effect, a creature who moves between land and sea and earth and sky. Her path figures and shapes and seeks fodder. And because it’s the twenties and the yawl is his home, he likely has the phonograph cranked so that the Gershwin is also part of the scene, another course in the bounty of sensation. There’s rhythm in the light and on the beach and in the sea. There’s the seagull being a seagull. There’s the gall of a gull to consider landing on the deck of a yawl to swipe a bit of his sandwich before she lifts off once more. Wings like propellers, an instinctual physics of lift and thrust. Resting on airs that push up and riding the thermals that ascend from the bay. He’s not worried so much about how they fly, just glad that they do. That they do in a world of sink and submersion. He’s a sailor, after all, another being who can sense the southwesterly on a cellular level. For a moment, he dwells in the ancient longing to shuck his hu-manness for an avian being ever knowing he can’t. His wings are the sails, his flight is to paint. His work is to behold the lift and glide and to hear its music and then to make the music something we might see, knowing all of this is a bit more than a metaphor. He drifts with the bay’s currents. The boat rises and falls with the wind and the sea. The bands of radiant light; the colors of concentricity; the conical swirling of clouds; the bird’s motif, her motive, her motion. Both his eyes and the gull’s find ways to flush out the salt so they might keep seeing. Who knows if she can see color, but he can see her plumage, how gray and black make green. How the clouds tear open, how gray and blue make violet. And how on this stretch of sand, the jingle shells lend a peach glow, the mother-of-pearl layer where the gull searches for stray mollusks. From the deck of a yawl, gazing at the spit of land, he puts oil on metal, knowing the motif is what impels, what guides, what awakens. The seagull’s motif is the force line of her flight, and she sets his paintbrush in motion.
“Landscape at Cagnes”
—Arthur Dove, 1908
This is over there. Sun-drenched, lemon trees, skies like birds’ eggs,
groves mint green, paint daubed and lush with summer plums
a hill town hugged between Antibes and Nice before the beaches
became famed for expat summer fêtes fueled by martinis and mayhem.
This is over there, old villas, white stone gleaming back ten centuries
of sun, one of a dozen landscapes you did of le Midi. Most were lost.
You left that style there, along with a painting of a lobster
and a still life with a bowl of fruit and flowery wallpaper.
You left Monet and Renoir and took back a tiny bit of Matisse.
You packed in your trunk a stack of canvases, the famed Kandinsky book
and came back here to the streets of Manhattan, to the Long Island Sound.
You came back to engine grease under your nails and photo chemicals in your nose
and skyscraper construction in your eyes and Gershwin in your ears
and to a palette without pastels, exchanging birds’ eggs for metallic steel.
You came back to oak tree bark, thunderstorms, derricks, and ferries,
back to transcendentalists who thought God was nature and so are we.
You came here to this harbor, to where I now feel settled, mortgaged, seasoned
tending to pear trees and admitting kids don’t easily fly across an ocean.
You were content to leave it, a scene you never needed, a son of upstate,
the Finger Lakes, the Catskills between, Islands of Manhattan and Paumanok.
This is the painting that shows you knew your stuff.
Everything that followed showed how you made it new.
“Partly Cloudy”
—Arthur Dove, 1942
He was a watcher of weather, a captain of winds.
A surveyor of atmospheric wanderings. His hair
and eyes taste like the sea from a swim in the sound
and from fresh-caught flounder for dinner.
He sees the second the tide shifts, ruminates
on the patterns in the cosmos, quivers
with the wild currents swelling round us.
Partly cloudy is both forecast and drama,
great beasts of magic swiftly streaming
across the heavens. And the sun, worthy
of worship, even in the roaring twenties,
even with cars and skyscrapers and machines
making sails and the gales that animate them
less needed. Somehow, it’s all connected—
circle circling circle, held high in the center,
energy undulating out, passing through the clouds
and the sky and then into my circular eyes
just like the jazz notes swim in his cells
and the swimmer shapes a sun with her arms
and the ripples reach me, volts of ancient electricity.
There’s so much in this world we might only see
when we stop and watch how the wind shifts
through it. He chose the space between two necks,
which means he chose the place that in turn
chose me, and I choose partly cloudy days
for all the unexpected ways they have me
watching, witnessing, wondering
how to bridge this space between us.
Clouds like kidney beans jigging and jiggering
to his mandolin. A forecast straight from heaven,
a sense that all is change, and, with eyes on the skies,
all is right.
Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals including After the Art, Literary Mama, About Place, and The Denver Quarterly. She is the 2025 Long Island Poet of the Year and Assistant Professor in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury.