I first worked with my friend, the Serbian artist Nikola Stanković, in 2018, when I opened a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the virtual world of Second Life: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Seaforth/85/198/29

Nikola Stanković’s outstanding paintings formed our first exhibition there, where I was impressed by the variety of techniques he uses, from drawing to classical oil painting, to achieve inspirational, passionate and ecstatic work on spiritual, erotic, wild life and primeval themes.

Glinka Gallery has now held four shows of his work and the latest one, Animal Instinct, currently running, includes his picture, Fight, above, an enigmatic portrayal of two stags in deadly but seemingly nervous conflict. When we were hanging the pictures at the gallery, there was a space next to this work and Nikola asked me if I had a suitable poem to put there – one that reflected some of the themes of his show. I thought about this for a moment or two but had to say no, I had written nothing that could do that job and then, after another moment or two, I said I would try to write him a poem to hang there. The result was a new Fibonacci poem, a Fib, entitled Rutting which I dedicated to him and subsequently submitted to the excellent online poetry journal The Fib Review, https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/ a specialist in Fibonacci poetry and a great supporter of my syllable-based work in this form.

I was particularly happy to write a poem for Nikola and I saw it as a kind of reciprocal act as a few years ago, he painted a picture for me called Remembering Blue, the title of my poetry collection and a quote from the opening poem there, my Haiku. https://www.bookdepository.com/Remembering-Blue-Colin-Bell/9781908742704

Unsurprisingly, Nikola came up with a picture that was totally unexpected, but which penetrated behind some of the things I was trying to say in my collection. It was a kind of artistic tit for tat. I hope we will work like this more often.

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