Orange Sunshine Poetry is a unique futures creative enterprise; a collaboration between the highly acclaimed award-winning British poet and novelist Jeremy Reed, and the brilliant California inspired photographer Lisa Renee Wilkerson, whose saturated colour techniques so closely resemble the rich visual poetic imagery employed by Jeremy Reed, the two artists meeting seamlessly in their concentrated focus on magnified detail as the vocabulary of imagination. Orange Sunshine Poetry is the first commercial enterprise of its kind to offer amongst other tailor made facilities, the creation of customised work to suit individual tastes, corporate needs, private functions including birthdays, anniversaries, poems and prints created for girlfriends or boyfriends, valentines, marriages, deaths, the celebration of any significant personalised occasion, event or thing, private or public through the fusion of poetry and visual image, the two optionally enhanced by an individually created spoken word recording of the poetry performed by Jeremy Reed with music from Itchy Ear, as the Ginger Light, a popular London-based duo, who perform regularly in clubs, cafes, galleries and theatres. Often recognised as the most distinctive performer of poetry in the UK, Reed’s extraordinary attention-grabbing vocal delivery, to be sampled on this site, is superbly coloured by the evocative atmospherics of Itchy Ear’s painterly brush-stroked music. Orange Sunshine Poetry accepts commissions for original customised work, as well as selling limited edition signed prints by Lisa Wilkerson with accompanying hand-written poems by Jeremy Reed, framed or unframed according to individual preference, as well as CDs by The Ginger Light.
Our business is aimed quite literally at putting orange sunshine into people’s lives, orange representing in Jeremy and Lisa’s symbolism, the sunny feel-good nature of poetic inspiration working at optimal levels, our name coming in part from the title of Jeremy Reed’s 250-page epic book-length poem on 1960s rock music and counterculture published by SAF in 2006, with an accompanying endorsement from Andrew Loog-Oldham, the manager of the Rolling Stones between the years 1962-1967. The aesthetic and dynamic behind Orange Sunshine, as the extension of Lisa Wilkerson’s and Jeremy Reed’s personalities is a strong emphasis on the celebration of beauty as it touches on all aspects of sensory experience.
Our aim is to put orange sunshine into your lives through creating individual works for you that continuously inspire and help change your lives from the predominantly functional into the liberated freedom of imaginative reality. We also offer Orange Sunshine Poetry CD packages for colleges, businesses and private use, aimed at helping shift the mind into altered spaces conducive to creativity by learning how to spatialize thought with colours and imagery that liberate it from purely routinal functions into imaginative sightings. Our Orange Sunshine Poetry modules are invaluable prompters to re-energising thought processes to maximize targets in the workplace, to assist students keep records of evaluative experience that can in turn be converted into creativity, and to help satisfy the individual attain a greater sense of mental and physical wellbeing by releasing inhibited creative potential through the expression of uncompromising art. We want Orange Sunshine Poetry to be the catalyst conducive to getting an immediate high through the firing up of natural brain chemicals like dopamine, by way of a synthesis of poetry, visuals and complementary electronic music.
Jeremy Reed’s unique facility to write about unusual and forward-looking subjects has earned him the reputation of being ‘British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie’, with the novelist J. G, Ballard claiming ‘Jeremy Reed’s talent is almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance…He steps out into our mundane world, and makes the dust sing.’ Amongst his recent books are the poetry collections Heartbreak Hotel, Orange Sunshine, Duck and Sally Inside, West End survival Kit and Bona Drag. His new collection Piccadilly Bongo, due out in August 2010 comes with a CD of related songs by the pop legend Marc Almond, as the first collaboration of its kind. His most recent novel is The Grid, and his biography of the Mod designer John Stephen –The Life of John Stephen King of Carnaby Street is due out in April 2010. His commitment to working with Lisa Wilkerson and the Ginger Light on Orange Sunshine Poetry is total.