Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph.
A bougainvillea in full flood is a hiding place: color, in this quantity, conceals better than night. The proof rises from the bottom edge, where two bare arms come up out of the coral mass and cross at the wrists, hands open, the person they belong to swallowed whole by bloom. I am given a crown of dark hair, nothing more. The picture offers profusion, pink, salmon, one sudden patch of violet, then withdraws the very body it has caught.
I confess the flowers alone would not hold me. They are magnificent and a little mute, as abundance often is; even the thin branch that climbs alone into the pale sky, waving its red tip like a signature, is charm rather than fascination. It is the crossed arms I cannot leave. Crossed: not raised in greeting, not quite a dive, an X drawn in skin above the garden, tender and faintly ceremonial. Do they shield a face I will never see, or begin a dance? Because I cannot read the gesture, I keep reading it.
Harvey, who lives among the gardens and fogs of coastal Maine, carried her domestic lyric to Bequia and found it intact: the same appetite for color, the same faith that a body and a flower explain each other. Her books (one is called, wonderfully, You an Orchestra a Bomb) and her place in American museum collections confirm what this frame already knows. The archival pigment print holds the saturation without shouting, skin against sky, sweetness with a secret. Every paradise needs a body to be lost in it.
A bougainvillea in full flood is a hiding place: color, in this quantity, conceals better than night. The proof rises from the bottom edge, where two bare arms come up out of the coral mass and cross at the wrists, hands open, the person they belong to swallowed whole by bloom. I am given a crown of dark hair, nothing more. The picture offers profusion, pink, salmon, one sudden patch of violet, then withdraws the very body it has caught.
I confess the flowers alone would not hold me. They are magnificent and a little mute, as abundance often is; even the thin branch that climbs alone into the pale sky, waving its red tip like a signature, is charm rather than fascination. It is the crossed arms I cannot leave. Crossed: not raised in greeting, not quite a dive, an X drawn in skin above the garden, tender and faintly ceremonial. Do they shield a face I will never see, or begin a dance? Because I cannot read the gesture, I keep reading it.
Harvey, who lives among the gardens and fogs of coastal Maine, carried her domestic lyric to Bequia and found it intact: the same appetite for color, the same faith that a body and a flower explain each other. Her books (one is called, wonderfully, You an Orchestra a Bomb) and her place in American museum collections confirm what this frame already knows. The archival pigment print holds the saturation without shouting, skin against sky, sweetness with a secret. Every paradise needs a body to be lost in it.