Welcome to Glinka Gallery, it’s open 24/7. it has six individual galleries for fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music and it is just a few finger clicks away from you wherever you are. I want to show you around.

I have always been involved with the arts world, from my student days, through many years making arts programmes for television, as a writer and, these days also as the artistic director of a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the ‘multi-player virtual world’ called Second Life, where I have the virtual name, Wolfgang Glinka.

Wolfgang Glinka and Colin Bell are interchangeable versions of the person known as Me, and my gallery, is an extension of many of the things I have done and others that I have dreamed of doing before anyone even imagined the enormous potential of virtual reality. Virtual reality, is as its name implies just another form of reality. Here, as you can see in my welcome notice to virtual visitors to the gallery, I have been able to curate an extraordinary group of artists from most branches of the arts – fine art, photography, poetry, dance and music. Actually all of my artistic passions.

Over the eight years of Glinka Gallery’s existence, and now in in fourth rebuild, we are getting bigger and bigger, the gallery has shown regular exhibitions by a family of regular artists, including our resident artist, Lash vv, creatives in both virtual and real worlds, who find freedom and support at what has now become more than a gallery, more of a creative arts centre.

We now have an ever-growing permanent collection of some of the work by our exhibitors over the years. I think of them as my friends.

I am a writer, a novelist and poet, and I have been experimenting here at the gallery with ways of putting poetry, in particular, on the walls, along with fine art. Therefore I have built specific spaces for poetry and created a role for a resident poet (Shyla the Super Gecko) who holds regular poetry reading events here.

I also put on exhibitions of my own work, especially my Fibs, short-form Fibonacci poems which lend themselves to life on the wall as well as on the page. They have their own home in the Fibonacci Gallery.

Here is my, well, Wolfgang Glinka’s short film of his, well my Fib, Reflections, published by The Fib Review and now also viewable on Youtube.

We also have a resident dance troupe, 21 Parakeets, directed by Joseph Nussbaum, a composer and choreographer, who has sought to make contemporary dance an equal partner here with fine art and poetry. His work is inspired by the wish to show challenging but also entertaining dance shows in our own custom built dance theatre, the Aviary Theatre, built by our buildings director, Tony Marino.

Since I’ve been running the Glinka Gallery, I have been able to develop my interest in photography, often too far down the list of my priorities, in a busy writing schedule. In the last eight years I have been pushing myself to make my photography an equal form of expression with my poetry. At first, I made photography exhibitions of my work mostly shot on foreign trips, buy recently I have developed my interest in photo-art, mostly known as digital photo-editing or image manipulation. This is a completely new world for me and I was excited to find I could attract a large audience for the first of my recent shows, Ecce Homo, (Behold the Man), an examination of masculinity at a time of crisis in male identity.

My most recent show is Dead Poets in Love, Queer Writers from Shakespeare to Burroughs. Here I am trying another experiment in bringing writing and photography together. This has been, maybe my longterm ambition for most of my life. In the gallery the texts float as an ethereal presence in front of my manipulated images of the writers themselves. In the movie of the show, I decided that it was better to leave out the texts. Maybe I will take this idea further in my next projects.

If the potential of the arts in the virtual world is new to you, and if you are interested to come to Glinka Gallery and to the other arts venues in the often under-estimated virtual platform, Second Life, https://secondlife.comhere is a brief look. We hope to see you there, maybe.

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Perseus and Andromeda

Nude

in chains

on the rocks

she’s picture-perfect.

Titian’s Andromeda displayed

for us mortals, for hungry beasts, and for Perseus

who dives seaward dressed-to-kill in pink and gold robes to slaughter the slavering monster.

He’s a boy-hero, pointing his scimitar, playing the man-of-action awed by the glamour of a damsel’s distress – he needs to impress.

Her life depends on this handsome man so she exhibits herself in a table-dance

wearing fettish limb-fetters and a dangling earring

she guarantees love at first sight.

In moments of stress

decorum

learns how

to

flirt.

Colin Bell 29/9/2020

I was inspired by the much-praised Titian exhibition, Love Death and Desire, at London’s National Gallery this summer, during the infamous Covid-19 pandemic – so much so that I decided to write a set of Fibonacci poems about them. Poetry based on specific works of art are known as Ekphrastic – my four new poems, Four Ekphrastic Fibs are the result and they have just been published in The Fib Review, that impressive Fibonacci specialist journal. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/

I thought I would reproduce them here along with the original paintings by Titian, maybe the greatest painter of the nude, known appropriately enough as the Poesie – or Poems. If you want to know more about these paintings read about them on my previous blog Titian Reunited: https://wolfiewolfgang.com/?p=19989

My four new Titian poems join a fifth, Diana and Actaeon, that was already published in a previous issue of the Fib Review in a set of poems inspired, like all of these paintings, by stories from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I have printed it again here below.

I write these poems using the Fibonacci mathematical number sequence for each line’s syllable count….and now having had 104 of them published by The Fib Review, I guess you could say that I’m hooked as you will probably see if you look back on some of my previous blogs on the subject of Fibonacci and the Fib. https://wolfiewolfgang.com/?p=19

My thanks, yet again, to The Fib Review for continuing to publish my work.

Venus and Adonis

Stay

moans

Venus

love’s goddess

Titian’s writhing nude.

Adonis springs hot from her bed

his blushes define the child out-grown by his body.

He is dressed for hunting, she’s undressed for him, helpless love personified by its queen

who is now tasting the pain she inflicts on us all.

His dogs salivate sensing blood,

the boy is confused:

why this fuss?

Venus sees

the death

of

youth.

Colin Bell 29/9/2020

Diana and Callisto

Chaste

queens

turn mean

at bath time

in Titian’s paintings –

he likes women out of their clothes.

Virgin goddess Diana is nasty when she’s nude

she’s addicted to alfresco ablutions in the woods with her handmaidens naked.

Useful for Titian but bad for the nymph Callisto

pregnant by the king of the gods

strip-searched found guilty

shaming us

who stand

and

stare.

Colin Bell 30/9/2020

Actaeon

Don’t

look,

he thought,

but he did,

fearing what he saw,

alert to the change in himself.

Until now he’d been just a lad hunting with hound dogs.

Eyes know your desires before you do, he discovered in that surprised unblinking glance.

Arousal felt bestial to this embarrassed young man.

The transformation was instant

and the first horn grew.

Love’s not blind,

he thought,

for

stags.

Colin Bell 05/10/2017

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I have finally got round to writing a blog now that, wisely or foolishly, the great British lockdown is being eased. Until now, I haven’t quite managed to write about this, the strangest of times. I was last on here in February for the launch of my poetry collection, Remembering Blue, http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-colin-bell-remembering-blue.htm After that memorable event, my last public adventure was when I went to London to see the impressive Troy exhibition at the British Museum.

Then the curtain came down on my life outside my home here in Lewes.

Here are some photographs and thoughts to mark the passage from then to now. Just one person’s view on the extraordinary and, for many, the often tragic interruption to normal life that was, and still is, Covid-19. I know that I have been very lucky.

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I am thrilled to be the new Featured Poet International for American poetry publisher, Muse-Pie Press, producers of the three highly-respected poetry journals: Fibonacci poetry specialist, The Fib Review; short-form poetry publishers, Shot Glass Journal; and the spoken-word magazine, Bent Ear Journal.

I have had a few short poems published in Shot Glass Journal, but in the last ten years I have had 99 Fibonacci poems published in 30 consecutive issues The Fib Review, the leading publishers of this very specific poetry form. Writing these short poems to submit to the triannual editions of The Fib Review has now become a a regular calendar event and I’m grateful to have had such support from the journal’s energetic editor, Mary-Jane Grandinetti.

There must be something about writing poetry to a precise syllable count that draws me again and again to what are known as Fibs. The style is named after the medieval Italian mathematician, Fibonacci, who saw a pattern, a code, some have said, in the sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233 etc. where the next number is the sum of the previous two. In the last ten years, I have written many Fibs using the Fibonacci sequence for the syllable count per line. So far I haven’t dared to write a line with any more than 233 syllables, but, maybe, one day, I will venture to 377 syllables and beyond.

Muse-Pie Press asked me to be their Featured Poet International a few months ago, and I was really excited to be honoured like this, but I hadn’t realised that they would publish 25 of my Fibonacci poems on my own featured page where they look, I like to think, true to their Fibonacci inheritance. Seeing them all together, I was delighted to see that they also form a poetic sequence – a digital chapbook – I hope you agree.

If you want to see the whole page, here’s the link – I hope you enjoy the Fibs and that you might even have a go yourself at writing one yourself. http://www.musepiepress.com/index.html

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I have three new Fibonacci poems published today in the Fib Review, the specialist poetry journal for this intriguing style based on the Fibonacci number sequence.

I’ve been writing them now for over ten years and The Fib Review has now published 89 of them. I’m amazed and delighted to have had this long relationship with this pioneering publication. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

My thanks, once again, to Mary-Jane Grandinetti, the editor of The Fib Review who has been guiding me on this interesting journey through a sea of numbers.

The post I can’t stop writing these Fibonacci poems. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Here is one of them, Tulips:

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I have two new Fibonacci poems published today in the splendid Fibonacci specialist journal, The Fib Review. It’s always a challenge to try to squeeze big things into little boxes but I had a go when I picked the great, melancholy and alcoholic Finish composer Jean Sibelius as the subject of one of these miniature syllable-count poems that are based on the so-called Fibonacci Code with the sequence of numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc. In the second poem, I try to take us back to our common ancestry in Africa.

Here’s the link – there are a lot of other Fibs there too – well worth you reading.

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell1.html

If you have never heard Sibelius’ music, take a listen to this, the finale from his 5th Symphony. It is thrilling – you might even hear those swans flying.

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As we reach the middle of February here in Lewes, UK, our winter is releasing its frozen grip out there and I can already see signs of hope out there on the horizon. I, inevitably, have succumbed to the latest viral infection that it buzzing round town but I haven’t been entirely idle.

I’ve been reading Alex Ross’s excellent book on 20th Century classical music, The Rest Is Noise. One of my new year’s resolutions was fulfilled this morning when I came to the end of this massive and massively impressive study of a difficult but truly exciting period in music.

I have also been writing – pretty well as usual – and over the last week, amongst other projects, I have written six new Fibonacci poems, scribbling away in the little doodling book that I keep for the purpose.

Naturally, I’ve been keeping company with a number of 20th century composers during this time and, this week, I’ve been listening to Shostakovich, Copeland, Jerome Kern and Messiaen – what an amazingly varied century it was for music.

Outside, in my little urban garden, things haven’t been idle either.

The bulbs are more than stirring….

the primroses are in bloom…

as is the wonderful Hellebores out there, like the primroses, thriving in two of the garden’s darkest corners.

My camellia too is beginning to flower with its boldly unseasonal red petals.

The snowdrops, of course, are now in their element….both old favourites….

…..and new plantings.

Before the lurgey forced me indoors, I’ve been out on my rambles around Lewes and was delighted to find one of my favourite plants in bloom down the road in the town’s Grange Gardens.

The Chinese witch hazel, hamamelis molis, with its intoxicating perfume and vibrant colour offers more than enough hope to me here in this moody Lewes February. Late winter is always interesting here in the UK, if you love plants. You just have to look a bit closer for their beauty.

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I’m celebrating today and it’s not all about numbers. They figure strongly in writing the usually short poetry form the Fibonacci poem which is based on the so-called Fibonacci Sequence of numbers.

The latest issue of  the world’s leading Fibonacci poetry journal, The Fib Review, is published today in its 25th issue on its 10th anniversary and, yes, my four new Fibs  bring my total 66 of poems published by the Fib Review. All these numbers are worth celebrating I think.

It may all look a bit dusty and arithmetical in the diagram but these numbers form a beautiful sequence that can be found in nature, in science,  in engineering and, yes, in art. The sequence consists of numbers where each  is the sum of the previous two, rising in numerical order and which can be seen in natural shapes  made from this ratio of numbers. It is the beauty of the sequence that has tempted poets to use the sequence as a way of ordering words and lines in poetry.

I have been writing Fibonacci poetry for eight years now by counting the syllables in each line so that the lines correspond to the sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34.  Until now, I’ve never dared to go any higher in the numerical order but in two of my new poems I have added 55 syllable lines. I’m delighted that they are to be included in the new publication of The Fib Review. Take a look, not just for my new poems but for the fascinating variations on the form achieved by all the other poets, from all over the world,  published there:

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

The Fibonacci Sequence is credited to the Italian mathematician Leonardo Bonacci who was also known as Fibonacci. He introduced this ancient Asian sequence into Western Europe in the 13th Century and it has fascinated mathematicians, scientists, artists, engineers and poets ever since.

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In a collaboration with the multi talented American film-maker Joseph Nussbaum, another of my Fibonacci poems has been turned into a miniature movie using the virtual world of Second Life as its starting point. The result, I think, is really original. The poem, Brief Encounter (published in The Fib Review – Musepie Press) makes a romantic and powerful film . The poem was written in strict syllabic count according to the Fibonacci Sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13 etc.) and is one of many of my ‘Fibs’ to be published in that excellent poetry journal The Fib Review. Here’s a link to the poem as it appeared there in 2011:

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/issue9/wolfiewolfgang4.html

The very concise form of the poetic style translates well into the equally concise filming style of Joseph Nussbaum – it was a happy coming together of different art forms making, I think, what looks like a Contemporary Dance piece. Poetry and Dance as Film – a great combination. Take a look:

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