Thomas Fink


Six Paintings

" I started painting in 1983, a good 15 years after I started writing poetry. Until 2001, I kept the verbal and visual spheres separate, at least consciously. But that year, I titled a painting “Gossip” to go on the front cover of Gossip, my second book of poems. I didn’t plan the painting to be seen as a highly abstract version of many folks gossiping, but, in retrospect, that reading might work. In January 2004, after finishing the poems collected and published eleven months later in After Taxes, I somewhat arbitrarily chose another cover painting called, naturally, “After Taxes.” At that point, I wanted to get away from the limited array of stanza patterns I’d used for three or four years. So, to find new stanza patterns, I talked to mathematicians about numerical sequences, but nothing seemed too promising, and I kept writing in my old stanzaic modes. Suddenly, it became clear I could forge a relation between painting and poetry by developing poems in abstract shapes that would then be used as imagery in series of paintings. So I’ve been doing that in both media for the past six months or so."

from: an Interview with Thomas Fink by Tom Beckett
E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S, 1/28/05

The full interview can be found here.

Thomas Fink is the author of 3 books of poetry, most recently AFTER TAXES (Marsh Hawk Press, 2004), and the forthcoming chapbook, STACCATO LANDMARK (Beard of Bees, 2006), as well as two books of criticism, most recently A DIFFERENT SENSE OF POWER (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001).

His paintings hang in various collections. Three of his poems appeared in issue one of Otoliths.

 
 
 
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