Poet Writer Artisan

‘If you could say it in words,’ painter Edward Hopper once remarked, ‘there’d be no reason to paint.’ For Chuck O’Neil, the work of the poet is to paint ⎯ to ‘say it’ phrase by phrase in color, in black and white, long shadows, impasto, slant of moonlight; a brushstroke here or there to evoke that which may in the end be unsayable.

A drive across the river on an early winter morning to pick up rough-sawn oak. A monument in the center of town dedicated in 1931 to soldiers and sailors. Weddings, an anniversary. A delivery to mid-town Manhattan. An artist’s rendering of a farm in spring, its barn, pastures, those hills beyond. The neighbor’s arthritic dog. The death of a best friend . . .

O’Neil’s voice is his own. And his poems mark the life of everyday things, earthly things so often tinged with the otherworldly. Lyrical, real world ‘works on paper,’⎯ watercolors, inks, pencil sketches, etchings ⎯ original and unframed, they hang together in the gallery he’s built over the years, one line at a time.