—”Perfect You” (POEM) And “THE PORTRAIT” (painting)
Image and poem from: Soul Collective – Poems and Paintings, by Marthe Bijman (July 2025, 2nd Ed., Blurb Books, ISBN 979-8-31-996715-2). Painting: “#101 – The Portrait (Classic Redone)”; Acrylic on canvas; Artist: Martha (Marthe) Bijman. Poem form: Quatrain.
PERFECT YOU
Trace the outline of his face —
The amber eyes with feather lashes
The bold nose with its arching planes
The lips curved into sensual s’s.
Perfect You – Spoken Word
The single, “The Portrait”, which is the specific project that led me to start painting portraits, including the one above, will be released in January 2026.
About Soul Collective
I wrote the poems and painted the portraits for my book, Soul Collective, while producing my single, The Portrait, in 2025. My songwriting partner, Sean Berchik, inspired the paintings in Soul Collective. Each of the portraits in the book has a poem that goes with it. Sometimes the poem came first, sometimes the painting did. The poems-and-paintings/paintings-and-poems are about music; the life of a musician; performing; writing; the creative process, art, and the collective that consists of him and me. Hence the title of the book – Soul Collective.
Each poem has a story
This poem is called “Perfect You” after one of my earlier tracks of the same name. It is a classical form of a poem, for a description of classical beauty. The words “trace”, “outline”, and “sensual s’s” refer to the phenomenon in figurative and portrait art called the “Line of Beauty”. This line is the double, elongated “s” of the ogee shape, a shape which swings in two directions. It can be formed from the Fibonacci curve, or spiral, a graphic representation of the Fibonacci Sequence. This curve is often found in nature, for instance in the structure of sea shells and fern leafs. The Fibonacci curve contains the Golden Ratio, and from this can be drawn the double-s curve that is called the Line of Beauty.
One part of the s-curve – the Line of Beauty – is longer than the other, and the deviation lends mystery and allure, and a natural balance. The Line of Beauty fits perfectly when superimposed onto a face that is beautiful or handsome, since beauty in a face is often a matter of symmetrically balanced features that are in ideal proportions.
The Line of Beauty flows from the pupil of the eye, to the tip of the nose, the outer corner of the mouth, to the chin. I tried to portray that symmetry and allure in the painting and in the poem. (Here’s a video of how it works.)
More of the portraits and poems can be found on my literature blog, sevencircumstances.com: