This book is about perception and the joy of creation, re-touched histories, perpetual mis-perceptions, a circus of projections, fox-fire paintings, bicycle archetypes, polyphonic artistry, dream sequins, sunflower landscapes, colour codings, synaesthetic synapses, scotoscopic shards, painterly translations, lexical licenses, umbering nudes, ekphrastic basses, paper maché on a stick, chromatic aberrations, haptic romances, false nostalgia, and uchronious moments, all illustrated by the painted creations of Jim Kemp while offering what the times demand. - Penn Kemp's spellbinding Colour Fielding awakens readers to the experience of living "along a grand colour spectrum." As the daughter of London painter Jim Kemp, inspired by her father's work, that of his colleagues, and numerous other artists, Kemp offers many ekphrastic poems that explore the interstitial spaces where the various art forms meet. Yet she gives priority to sound because sound is vibration, generative, including the potential for the dazzle and mystery of colours, forms, and images. Her "intrasensory perception" attunes us to the resonances of words, where the visual opens to primal aural and oral fields, pointing to the ground of silence from which all art, images, and sounds arise. Colour Fielding is therefore a book of ontological inquiry into the question, "Where do the paintings and poems come from?" Enter these poems that linger near the quantum energy fields of the invisible where perception opens to the timeless.. "Trickster visionary Penn Kemp's Colour Fielding guides the viewer/reader through her father Jim Kemp's vibrant goddess art and her own ekphrastic, autobiographical, multi-canon-celebratory poems into an original way of seeing/being. No subscriber of conventional line, form, structure, whether in poetry or painting, Kemp allows sound and written image to gather us into new dimensions between the worlds, between the lines, between the possibilities into a supra-mystical state where the senses lift us above our differences and celebrates our communion with all beings. Through hands-on experience close study and immersion in several canons, Penn Kemp in these poems has arrived at an unprejudiced, un-presumptuous perception that unifies, honours and allows essence to shine in all of its mystical, loving, compassionate glory. Seeing art through poetry, climate correctives through beauty, the synaesthetic derangement of the senses lifts us above our differences and celebrates our communion with all beings. Our fractious divisive world needs this harmonious synaesthetic lens NOW.- Katerina Vaughan Fretwell, artist and author of Holy in My Nature
"Colour Fielding is a linked symphony of poems that crosses the boundaries between music, painting and memoir. In this self portrait of a painter's daughter and her confrontation of such painters as O'Keefe and Kahlo, sound is laid down in brush strokes to build up a pictorial world. Reading Colour Fielding is to be played like a cello, as Kemp's mind builds this world out of a non-differentiated field without losing the original unity. Part narrative, part lyric and part critical portrait of a life lived through art, like Terry Riley's 'In C', it rarely wavers from its central musical line. It is music that is the sense here. That the words make perfect sense follows its lead."- Harold Rhenisch, author of The Salmon Shanties
"Colour Fielding is Penn Kemp's arts poetica, strong and believing. Her particular way of seeing/speaking is fascinating: I love the authority, the thought of these poems. So important! The phrase 'between thrum and shimmer' encapsulates her work well."- Sharon Thesen, author of Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems
