He was also, of course, one of the luminous figures – with Bellow, Mailer, Vonnegut, Sontag, Snodgrass - of his literary generation.
The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford, draws on the past both by including stories by such luminous figures as Eudora Welty, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie and by virtue of its previous edition, published 15 years ago.
Why not send this imaginary brother across the Atlantic to the "rank-grown forests" (as Keats wrote in a later poem) of America, Kentucky, say, and invent encounters with luminous figures like John James Audubon and giant catfish and backwoods swindlers living on "bear sandwiches greased with bear fat"?
In the early nineteen-twenties, women who painted luminous figures on watch dials swallowed minute amounts of radium as a result of touching the brushes to their lips, and in some of these women bone cancers developed after a lapse of more than fifteen years.
In time, he became one of the most admired artists of the Golden Age of Dutch painting, renowned for the precision and detail of his portraits and self-portraits, still lifes, scenes of daily life and night scenes of luminous figures emerging from darkness into the glow of candelight.
I felt soothed by the ordinary yet somehow remarkable knowledge that these luminous figures were far from immune to the pain of unrequited love and the humiliation of rejection (spotlight, here, on Anais Nin and Gore Vidal).
The child's cry, close by now, of the dolphin calf, and the mother breaks the water, a luminous green form leaving a figure of itself in the air, bright water dropping, a glow, crashing color landing, back, into the water.
The luminous figure is alive but poised and contained, not simply dumped amid dirty linen.
In addition, he also found that "marked changes in the luminous intensity of either figure or ground [did] not disturb reaction so long as the brightness relations of figure and ground [were] not reversed" [138] (e.g., see Fig. 1C, top row).
One of his most beautiful paintings from the 70's, regrettably not in the show, is another portrait of Peter Schlesinger, this one of him fully clothed, standing at the edge of a swimming pool, looking down into its luminous depths at a figure swimming underwater.
