Sea View Galelry: William Wright & Sara Lee Hantman

I was reading a poem by Frank O’Hara called Why I Am Not a Painter. The gist of the poem is it’s about creativity and how the subject of the work isn’t necessarily overt. The poet goes to visit a painter in his studio. He’s written SARDINES across an area of the painting because “it needed something there.” On another studio visit, the painter erased parts from the painting, leaving only letters. The poet says, “Where’s SARDINES?” At the same time, the poet is writing while thinking about the color orange, but he never mentions orange in the final poem, yet he titles it ORANGES. It’s this idea that things are happening, but you don’t have to be specific about them. I love that idea then with my sardines and the lemon. That became my reference point for the poem. It was an accidental way of falling upon something that has a kind of poetry to it. It gave it another unintentional and fortuitous layer, but it seemed to be what the painting was about. – William Wright