© 2024 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Basil King sketched forty-three faces with charcoal, and as he sketched them, he began to call them his Russian Novel. When Basil introduced them to me and asked if I would set them to music in a video, I looked … Continue reading
© 2024 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
Basil King did all of his Illuminations the summer of 2021. He and his wife Martha had moved into a little apartment on the third floor of their daughter’s house in Jersey City while their home was being renovated … Continue reading
© 2023 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Recently, I visited Basil and Martha King at their beautiful home in Brooklyn. Baz has been sketching faces in charcoal—I really enjoy the adventure of looking at them. Not long ago, he was featured in The Cafe Review, a … Continue reading
© 2022 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
I love reading Basil King’s poetic histories because they connect time and place and people in unexpected ways that I find delightful. In Basil’s new collection, There Are No Ghosts, There Are Portraits, the first piece, “Soutine, Modigliani, Chagall,” makes … Continue reading
© 2020 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… Basil King focuses on the details that sparkle and create the most important events in an artist’s life. His new book, Disparate Beasts, is the history of a thousand pages condensed through poetry into one. Although he began as … Continue reading
© 2019 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… When I was visiting Basil and Martha King recently, BAZ took me upstairs to his studio to see what he has been working on since January, a series called The Green Man Comes to 4th Street, engaging portraits with … Continue reading
© 2017 Don Yorty. All rights reserved.
… I visited Basil and Martha King at their home in Park Slope where they moved in the late 1960s when the house had little value surrounded by desolation and the turf wars of the drug trade. Their backyard has … Continue reading