I didn't know Noel very well. We never met but we used to chat on messenger and were no way involved in fixing the result last year with Miles. It was a great shock when I heard of his death in September. Noel was not only a prodigious painter but this posts were long, lyrical and utterly barking mad. It will come as no surprise that Noel was a published poet and editor of poetry journals. I have one of his books, "Point me at the stars", published is 2018. They say a picture paints a 1000 words, a good poet can paint the some picture in 3 or 4 words and the best poems have these images running though my brain like a movie
This is one of his poems
Fire Moths
Deep in the maze of a gate-leg table
is my drop-leaf childhood watchtower.
Lost in a forest of folded deal,
I've a parade of lead: bandsmen in bearskins
marshalled by a lancer on a brindle cow.
His sheepdog jinks through table legs
and castle walls, herding an aviary
of pelicans and fishing birds.
Still pristine from Christmas.
To watch them pass, I squeeze
my face to the floorboards' wax and lavender
where the cellar light chinks through.
I can squint down at the silences
of fatherhood and coal-dust.
Scrawling notes in imaginary languages,
I push them through the floorboard gap.
My father may find them,
grey moths fallen on a heap of coke.
Unread they'll burn in the fireplace
their knots rising in sparks against the soot,
a comet tail, dazzling, bright ash.
This lead me to paint this
I'm sure that Noel would have loved that figure. Well done for finding a figure to match the poem!
Tamsin