VERMILION SCARVES RESOUNDING SURF,

Clayon Eshleman, 2008

I open Linda Jacobson’s red door to pot-headed lordly and deathless hybrids.
I hail and beware of their shadows, for they consume the shadows we costume here.
The earth wears fluid robes. Strewn Petals strewn on a yoni gust and blend.
The sky is a bath incestuous.

Aphrodite’s pudenda is served on an orchid, or is that Naropa's leprous pinkie?
--or a heather-stuffed caterpiIlar?

Is Santa Claus now flashing through the chimney of my chest, an Amanita blur, all sirloin, no stars?
In Linda Jacobson’s vision, Goya hunches by a menstrual harp of vermilion scarves resounding surf. In a stone’s magenta folds, the moon swims Atlantisward through the serpent panels of our spines. I am filled with praise for these radial stages layered with animals and yellow sand.
Pink earth quilted with tufts of violet grass. Earth of clouds like tangled, albino eels. Earth of miniver and rose rock alive as coral reefs. The dead are glimpsed: fuscous hands gripped in prayer. Earth of cobalt thrasher-filled trees, chirping purple buds.

In Jacobson’ s dreamscapes I rediscover Bixby Canyon Bridge agasp with 9 eyes, Allen Ginsberg's tidepool bubble talk high on seals like fat brown worms, an azure sky with amber thistle lighting up flocks of boulder nuzzling.

I marvel at how, as a true shaman-painter, she has translated the torment of Edvard Munch’s human figures that blend into each other in curvaceous anxiety. In Jacobson, Munch’s anguish is beautifully turned into land and sea scapes in which the Norwegian’s morbid meldings become ecstatic interpenetrations.

The art of Linda Jacobson has the boldness of a dilated peony, bemused in a bower lined with dragons.