Portly Bard After Angry Dan After L.S. Lowry

Author's note: This is the Co-op, Market Square that Lowry painted, now the Columba Club, featuring Angry Dan's Lowry limerick mural.

The Co-op, Market Square, Cleator Moor, by Laurence Stephen Lowry, England, 1950
​https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-laurence-stephen-lowry-ra-the-co-op-market-4186356/?from=salesummery&intobjectid=4186356

Lowry Limerick Mural, by Angry Dan (England) contemporary

On the West Cumbrian Lowry Stop in Angry Dan’s Lakes Limerick Trail

He gives life to community walls
with the murals he brightly installs
where a limerick sings
as the music it brings
to his art that provokes and enthralls

such as this on the pale of a wall
once the market that many recall
in the Lowry work known
for the chill of its tone
in far drearier shades of appall

he deemed fit for the likes of the lot
so content to be all they were not
as the waifs in a mix
of industrial sticks
to be used like the pens from a pot.

It's but one of Dan's five that remind
the beholder of gold left behind
when West Cumbrian charm
so beloved will disarm
eye and mind it sublimely inclined.

But he brings to the young a bit  more
whom he teaches with gifted rapport
to use limerick skill
as the wit and the will
to embrace what they learn as their lore.

​Portly Bard

Lowry Limerick Mural, by Angry Dan (England) contemporary

Note from Portly Bard:

I was immediately taken with Dan's work when I came across it.  

Though even a diligent child can do a limerick admirably to pleasant effect, writing in such a compact form masterfully with genuinely mature wit and charm is deceptively challenging.  Taking effective liberty with the expectation that the universal familiarity of such a form creates is even more demanding.  And to Illustrate well done limericks with complementing visual simplicity, tone, and wit truly rarifies what is already an incredibly difficult accomplishment.

But what really made Dan's impression so chiseled was reading about what he does to make sure that the public is engaged  --  rather than enraged  --  with his work.  It is typically commissioned in the name of the community it graces, and with Dan's unique interaction, it becomes welcomed education and cheerfully adopted transformation.

I almost instantly imagined these two signs on Dan's "storefront" windows:

Angry Dan's Limerick Art

For their humour and wisdom at heart
I give limericks life in my art
as aesthetic delight
in the rarified sight
that a mural done right will impart.


**
​
Angry Dan's Maps

I do maps that not only provide
the clear aerial view you're denied
but that also as art
become images heart
can recall as delightfully eyed.

Portly Bard

London Map, by Angry Dan (England) contemporary

Daniel John "Angry Dan" Ryder is a renown British poet, illustrator, and street artist, which in his case means both an exterior muralist and a travelogue cartographer.

He has curtailed professional musicianship to enlist his poetry, painting, and personable rappport in creative interactive community recognition and celebration.  He is best known for his well placed, eye-catching, thought provoking exterior murals that illustrate clever limerick poetry he adapts to community character and history with remarkable insight and wit in the spirit of the kindred folk music with which he is so familiar.

Learn more about Dan here:

www.angrydan.com
www.instagram.com/angrydan

Portly Bard: 
Prefers to craft with sole intent...
of verse becoming complement...
...and by such homage being lent...
ideally also compliment.

Ekphrastic joy comes not from praise
for words but from returning gaze
far more aware of fortune art
becomes to eyes that fathom heart.