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In October of 2022, I received an email in French. With an attachment. Highly suspicious. Obviously I did not open the attachment. But it couldn't hurt to click on the "translate this email" button. It read:
“A text inspired by one of your paintings. A chair under a bridge, in the middle of a road!
Best regards. –Michel Lagrange”
I knew immediately to which painting he referred:

"Ghost" 2022 oil on paper 22" x 30"

So I opened the attachment after all. It contained a poem. Also in French. I do not speak French. So I ran the text through a quick online translation. The results were, well – intriguing. Clearly the translation program was not up to the subtleties of poetry. I did a quick search for the author’s name plus the words “French Poet” and found a French Wiki page on the career of a gentleman born in 1941 who has been publishing poetry since the 1970s; a former classics professor and a “Knight of the National Order of Merit.” Could it possibly be the same person? It seemed unlikely.

I forwarded the email to an acquaintance of mine, Marc de Faoite, an Irish author and essayist who had recently moved to France and writes in French as well as English. Would he translate the poem? And did he think the poem might be from the same Michel Lagrange? He warned me that it was a pretty common sort of name in France, but agreed to do the translation. Michel soon followed up with another poem. I forwarded it onto to Marc who replied with his translation of the first poem. It was clearly a powerful piece of writing. Marc also told me that yes, this work was definitely by the same Michel Lagrange.

Excerpt from the English translation of "La Chaise" (The Chair)

Cast out
Unwanted
In the middle of the road
When dusty fallout
Gives way
To Milky Ways

Remembering being a tree

In the spot where it was uprooted
Before roads were invented

...

It is the fabled moment
The once-upon-a-time of old tales
When reason cracks

Under its full ancestral weight

translation by Marc de Faoite

 Over the following months, Michel, Marc, and I sent numerous emails back and forth. After Michel had sent me 13 poems, each one based on a painting of mine, I suggested that the collection would make a wonderful book. He agreed enthusiastically. 

(see book details here)

Just over a year after I received that first email, I published the book, "Seconde Main: 13 Ekphrastic Poems". If you're not familiar with the term Ekphrasis, it's a Greek word that literally means description. In English, it often refers to a poetic description of visual art, most famously, Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn". But it can refer any work of art that purports to describe another work of art created in a completely different form: Symphonic music based on a poem (Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn"). Music based on paintings (Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition"), paintings based on Music, and so on.

The poems are not strictly about my paintings. The paintings are merely a starting point for the poet’s own musings on art, joy, ambition, failure, hope, and – ultimately – mortality. His poems are an expression of what it means to be alive, especially as the end of life looms closer. Many of these paintings were completed when I was a younger man, dealing with more immediate and personal issues, my own mortality little more than a remote and curious concept. That they spoke to him about his place in his own journey, testifies to the power of art. If he had not based the poems on my work, I might have been inspired to make paintings based on his poems.

Michel and I have never met. We live in different countries. We are of different generations. I do not speak French. He does not speak English. But we understand one another. Because that is what art does. It reaches out to complete strangers and connects us through our shared humanity. A piece of art speaks to us when it connects directly to our personal experience even though the artist knows nothing about us. And yet, somehow, the artist does know us. And we them.

—

 After the book was printed, Michel continued to send me poems. As of this writing he has sent me a total of 35 works, each one based on a different painting (two of them murals, which are still paintings). So there is more to come. Another book at least. What I'd really like to do is organize an exhibition of as much of the paintings as I can gather. Some of them are long gone, and I have no idea who the current owners are. Some have not only sold, but resold. But there's a few still in my possession and others living in homes that I know with people who might be willing to part with them temporarily. We shall see.

"The Big Backyard" 2017 mural 30' x 40'

excerpt from the English translation of "UNE CHAISE EN PLEIN CIEL" (The Chair in the Sky)

Sometimes it is enough
To let the emptiness around us penetrate,
For happiness to be within our grasp
And for life to become a masterpiece again.

by Michel Lagrange
translation by Marc de Faoite