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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My debut poetry collection is called Remembering Blue after a line in the opening poem, Haiku.

The poem was my first attempt at writing in this difficult Japanese short-form poetry style. I’m still not sure if I fulfil all the demands of Haiku traditionalists, but it works for me and it acts as an appropriate preface to the collection.

The poem had been around for a few years before it appeared in Remembering Blue – it has even been made into a little film by my talented friend Joseph Nussbaum in the virtual world Second Life. You can still see it on Youtube., along with other films he’s made with my poetry.

The paperback edition of Remembering Blue (published by Ward Wood Publishing) is, maybe, best purchased from Wordery for free worldwide postage:

https://wordery.com/remembering-blue-colin-bell-9781908742704?cTrk=MTU4MTA4MjIwfDVkMzBhOTY1YTQwMTc6MTo1OjVkMzBhOTQzNWJjMDkxLjAzNDg4OTU1OjgzZTNlYjNl&fbclid=IwAR3b-2JitQhwRHeP77gwSr_V8egSKdczwZ-BMix97230qXZyiZ1rLgmTQKc

The digital edition is available as a Kindle – buy it online from Amazon in your country.

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It has been an interesting month for my Fibonacci poetry – first, I’ve had three new poems published in the Fib Review, see yesterday’s post, and now I have seen the splendid animated film that Joseph Nussbaum has made of one of these poems, Alcyon and Ceyx.  Joseph has made a number of films around my poetry in the past and I’m really happy that he has done this new one. It has been entered for an award in Australia and I hope it does well.  This is not only an interesting way of making movies but it’s a great way to get poetry out there to people who may not make a habit of reading poetry. whether you like poetry or not,  I hope you will like Joseph’s film about the young couple, from the Roman poet Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, whose love in anticipation of Wagner, survives beyond death.

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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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I wrote a miniature Fibonacci poem five years ago on the gigantic subject of humanity’s ideas of the Universe and religion – well, there’s no need for humility if you’re writing a very short poem. It was called The Music Of The Spheres and was published in that excellent poetry journal The Fib Review: http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/issue10/wolfiewolfgang2.html – I hadn’t thought about it much since then until recently when the highly imaginative Joseph Nussbaum approached me asking to make a short animated film of the poem.

I was thrilled earlier on today to see the result. Wow! I think it’s magnificent. See what you think:

“Music of the Spheres”, a video by Joseph Nussbaum. FIlmed in Second Life. Poem by Colin Bell. Music by Moby. Sculpture by François Arteo. With Marly Moon, Joseph Nussbaum, Boris Twist, Bryan Trefoill, and Novs Morlim.

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My thanks are due to the multi-talented Joseph Nussbaum for his film, so carefully made, of my poem Silent House. It was a great experience sharing brains with such a perceptive director. It’s great when that solitary poet life can be shared like this.  I loved Tim Risher’s music too. Here are a couple of stills and, below, a copy of the film. Hope you like it…I shall be keeping it, with the other films of my work, in the video column on the right of this page

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My prose poem, On Gloucester Road, has had an interesting life so far. I wrote it after being contacted with the Moscow-based American publisher, Marco North who was compiling an anthology and asked me if I would write him a prose poem.

 I told him I didn’t really know what a prose poem is but he was very kind about my writing here on these blogs and insisted that I should try my hand at one.  Well, thanks to the charismatic and highly persuasive Marco North, the poem was born and published in a splendid collection called In The Night Count The Stars Night  published by Bittersweet Editions http://www.bittersweeteditions.com/

Recently, I was approached by another persuasive American, the Californian composer and film-maker, Tim Risher, who said he’d like to make a short animated film of the poem for which he intended to write the music too. So my poem has born again, this time as a movie made with the computer graphics as supplied by the vibrant artistic community from the virtual computer world, Second Life, where I do weekly poetry events under the name of Wolfgang Glinka. Tim Risher has a presence there too as Joseph Nussbaum. Here’s a link to his other music:  http://www.wehrs-music-house.com/?page_id=613

Tim Risher (aka Joseph Nussbaum)

 

 

This is my third collaboration with Tim and i’m really pleased, yet again, with the results. You can see the others on the right hand column of this page. The film is out on YouTube today. Here it is – hope you enjoy your dinner at Sloppie Joe’s.

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I was very happy to see a fine new animated film, Haiku, by my friend, the talented American composer and film-maker, Tim Risher (aka Joseph Nussbaum).  It was exciting that it was based on one of my poems, Haiku. It’s terrific when poetry, music and film come together like this. This is the second of my poems to be made into a film but, in the nature of Haiku, this one’s only short so give me a moment of your time and take a look – it’s wonderful:

See the other poem film, Sortie, also with music by Tim Risher, directed by Boris Twist – there’s a link in the left column on this page.

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