Imagine the artist as the only body on the shoreline of Lake Michigan

whose horizon is irrefutable before fallible eyes. Water and land and sky.

Inflow the Fox and Grand and Muskegon rivers. Every body has a mission.

How to paint a lake as live as root and rock and blood? Does it take a god

to create pliancy of shore grass, coarse of beach sand? Clouds defuse light,

and the trained eye forgives the mind its faults, like how into each carpet,

the weaver produces a deliberate flaw as an act of humility. Solvent water

plus insolvent rock, as in Kono’s black lava rock absorbing sunlight on the day

Captain Cook was deemed no god, so he was slaughtered dead. Where blue

buoys soft and green weaves green, she renders a small boat quiet on the lake.

Later, she knife-scratches the boat out. The landscape, where water and wet

cleave, remains unmoored by its own image. Hear the seagulls insouciant

about the artist’s sky. Chartreuse and silver and cyan, pastels greening illuminate

the climb. No, the painter can’t forget periwinkle as vulnerary while she maps

her own body in the making. Looking and painting plot not what is, but what

can be. Lake waves slam land, and, windless miles out, water as flat as a book.

Across six types of vegetation and four types of trespasses and further up, above

lake water blue, June sky cools. Artists pair the small and the vast, for each work

is emotionally echt and not one body is needed to complete it.

Janée J. Baugher

Janée J. Baugher, MFA (writer, editor, lecturer) is the author of  The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction (McFarland, 2020) and The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles (Tupelo Press, 2026). For more information, visit www.JaneeBaugher.com