Oh, no. It’s Charlie Loan’s cadmium yellow Sun

A painter friend hung a large abstract impressionist

painting by Charlie Loan on his bedroom wall

at his parents house in the southend of town, well,

more like the center of town, I guess.

I saw it there a number times while visiting, bullshitting,

and smoking cigarettes.

Charlie might not have known what he was doing

when he painted the picture in art school back in ’66.

The landscape was composed of nondescript shapes

in bright primary reds and blues and greens lined-up

at the base of the painting.

Above the landscape hung the Sun, bigger than it’s usually seen

from our standing positions on the planet, huge in fact, heavy with

a cadmium yellow’s fiery intensity.

This morning, the New York Times is reporting that the “atomic”

pigment used in cadmium yellow oil paint degrades with age

to a bland, chalky blob.

The Times was generally referring to Joan Miró, with mentions

of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, and Munch’s “the Scream”–– in that

the cadmium yellows there were fading fast into the chalky distance.

Those giants of art couldn’t have known what the time-bomb buried deep

within the pigment would do as the luminescence marched on all around it.

and poor Charlie Loan!