Poet Malcolm Guite has been kind enough to lend me his face, poetry and music. To thank him for his generosity, I’ve compiled all of the paintings resulting from our long distance friendship and collaboration into a video. The background music is from his album Malcolm Guite – The Green Man and Other Songs.

A brief background:

My boss, singer/songwriter Steve Bell met Guite for the first time a couple of years ago at a C.S. Lewis Summer Institute (conference) in Cambridge, UK. Their friendship grew to collaboration in music and lyric for Steve’s Christmas album Keening for the Dawn (2013), and most recently on his 25th anniversary collection (4 disks) called Pilgrimage (2014).

Journalist/photographer Lancia E. Smith did some interviews with Guite and took some amazing photos of him, and graciously gave me permission to use them to create the first three portraits, The Journey, Mozart at Greenbelt and Saying the Names, the last of which now resides in the home that Guite shares with his wife Maggie. The three portraits were the beginning of a flurry of new paintings, mostly abstract and using embedded sonnet text. (All of the paintings are featured in the video.)

Article about the collaboration of four artists from around the globe for the MB Herald in August 2012.

In September 2013, Guite visited Winnipeg, and I met him for the first time at Signpost Music studios, where he spent some time recording an audio version of his poetry book, Sounding the Seasons.

Malcolm and Steve performed for the first time together at the West End Cultural Centre to a sold out crowd.

I proudly own three of Malcolm Guite’s CDs. My husband and I especially love The Green Man, which is featured in the painting video.