Jean-Yves Solinga

Great Blue Heron in Paris

Between Monet’s Nymphéas and revolutionary passions
Floating placid leafiness and sanguine virility

Pastel secrets of the palette
And codified political freedoms:
Visions and thoughts now solidified in neoclassical granite.

While on its fragility,
This bird unknowingly honors this setting
With nervous glances full of life and living.

Full of the now and the next meal:
A continuation of things within things
That strangely coexist in fruitful harmony
In an absurd concert of
Mopeds, horns and history.

Strange presence of this strange beast:
Iconic visitor looking up momentarily from the surface,
Towards its ancestors immortalized
In the golden colors of the stone
Of the Luxor obelisk.

Great blue heron at the pond of the Tuileries gardens: incongruous presence of this animal among the splendors of the past: L’Orangerie, on the left, where Monet’s “Nymphéas” are found and, on the right, le Jeu de paume, site of the” Serment du jeu de paume,” immortalized by Jacques-Louis David, when French revolutionary fervor gave birth to republican rights.

Jean-Yves Vincent Solinga
September 27, 2016

Author’s Statement on Beauty

The artist and his muse

She had always been close to him: A vaporous mist that defied capture since the shy, awkward, high school days. Beauty exists, but demands to be discovered by the artist. Like the passing of invisible soothing hands over his eyes, he is now capable to superimpose passion and creativity over the mundane of this world in an alchemy that transforms mere notes, basic colors and inert words into the language of the eternal.

Jean-Yves Solinga has lived between the south of France and Morocco. He holds a doctorate in French on the representation of the Maghreban landscape found in Loti, Gide, Camus and Le Clézio. He has published several books of poetry: Clair-Obscur of the Soul, Clair-obscur de l’âme (in French), In the Shade of a Flower, Landscape of Envies, Words Made of Silk, Impressions of Reality and Artist in a Pixelated World. In his latest, Asymptotes at the Limit of Passion, Solinga brings the infrastructure of poetry as close as possible to the border of reality and passion in our lives. The author has been a featured speaker at the Alliance Française; presented on the theme of Le déracinement (Cultural uprooting) at the International Colloquium: 20th- / 21st- Century French Studies at the University of Connecticut, the Center of the Teaching of French at Yale; The University and Southern Connecticut State University on the use of poetry in language studies; published in Art et Poésie, edited Jean-Claude George. He has featured at the Arts Café in Mystic, and the Bank Square Bookstore. He has co-featured at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center on the theme of social justice in poetry.