GALEN GARWOOD and PETER WELTNER have made a Valentine to Beauty and Arousal with photographs and poetry that are beautiful and aroused. Words italicized by arousal. Nakedness articulated by folds of cloth, a dialogue of flesh and flow that signals classical antiquity, but also the mystical inwardness of Mary's mantel. If the body is a language, here it speaks, in itself, of happiness, fulfillment, lush utopia. Arousal is the wing that carries it upward. Not wisdom through suffering but awe. But desire ignited by beauty, desire that submits to beauty that s another story, a story that may involve destruction, obsession and loss. And memory: our culture's visual memory, like the pictorialist photographs of Imogen Cunningham or the ethnographic studies of young natives by Baron von Gloeden, who also carried his camera to Sicily, and personal memory, like the Ronnie's and Bob's of Weltner's past. John Keats called beauty truth. Is it? Weltner and Garwood are not suspicious of beauty, belittled by it, made ironic by it. What do we do with beauty? submit to it, aspire to it, be ennobled by it, be destroyed by it? All of these. --Robert Glück
Galen Garwood is a painter, filmmaker, photographer and printmaker from the Pacific Northwest of the United States. His works have been exhibited in the US, Europe and Asia. His multi-media piece Adagio won a Bronze Award at the International Multi-media Film Festival in Philadelphia,1995, and in 1996 was included in the 1996 Venice Biennale s Xenograhia Nomadic Wall and again at Art Affair in New York. His film Cadmium Red Light was awarded First Place for Narrative/Documentary at the Port Townsend International Film Festival in 2007 and a First Place Award for Short Documentary for Ed and Ed at the DeReel Film Festival in Australia in 2008. He collaborated with the Pacific Northwest Ballet in 1979 and with a number of poets, most notably, American Poet, Sam Hamill with Passport'. Galen Garwood currently lives mainly in Thailand where he continues to be involved with the plight of the Asian elephant, as well as painting and art collaborations. Peter Weltner is the author of five books of fiction, Beachside Entries/Specific Ghosts (Five Fingers Press,1989), Identity and Difference (The Crossing Press, 1990), In a Time of Combat for the Angel (Five Fingers Press, 1991), The Risk of His Music (Graywolf Press, 1997), and How the Body Prays (Graywolf Press, 1999), and of three poetry chapbooks, Laguna Beach: After Shelter (Barnwood Poetry, 2009), From a Lost Faust Book (Finishing Line Press, 2009), and From a Lost Gospel of Mark (2River, 2010). News from the World at My Birth: a History, poems, was published in October, 2010.His writing has also appeared in several national anthologies, including Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, 1993 and 1998, and in several dozen literary magazines and journals.He lives in San Francisco s outerlands, two blocks from the Pacific.