The Dancer's Backskin

The Dancer's Backskin, 2011, 21cm x 29cm, 8"x11.5"
ink, watercolour on Moleskin notebook paper.
click for larger size

the dancer's backskin,
Moleskine sketchbook

the paper
cracked
like a boiled
eggshell
when you
tap it
tap it

_


The drawing was an accident - I had bought a new Moleskine notebook, the largest ever for me. When I brushed water over watercolour pencil the paper shredded badly and cracked like an eggshell when dry. Intrigued with the effect, and having seen Natalie Portman's incredible performance in Black Swan, the self-mutilation, the hallucinations, the madnesses, I thought of the underside of the dancer's life. Or her backskin.

In the image you see here, I layered a scan of the frontside of the drawing facing forwards (you can see it in the lines at the borders) under the backside which I made slightly opaque. I banded the dancer's face (some horror there, she is buried alive in her inhuman effort to be graceful for us), and her feet (to remind us of ballet as an echo of Geisha footbinding).

                                          

Stone #44

Powdery snow like a plush carpet under the thick rubber treads of my hiking boots. Patches of hidden skidding ice wake me from revery.

Stone #43

Grass lays uncombed
like dirty green hair.

A lattice of frozen white water
frames tufts in a lacework of ice.

Stone #42

A tired day, my book of ink words, images, obscure, inert, until I open the crisper drawer in the fridge, two papery onions.

Stone #41

Under the melting snow an accumulation of banalities, cigarette butts, plastic wrappers, sodden cardboard.

Stone #40

The black pupil of your eye hides a hall of flames burning darkly.

Stone #39

A comet crashes into html. Lunar dust oxidizes. A pion prevents a war. Lactic acid fossilizes a Boeing wing in-flight.

Stone #38

The path is disguised in the hologram of the cityscape. Where does it begin in the volumetric display, how do I follow it? Yet I must.

Stone #37

moss, ice rock, spore-green papillae, the invisible sun in the darkness

Stone #36

Phone home. You left a message for yourself. Listen; hang up. Try again. What is your message? Should you save or erase yourself?

Stone #35

Follow the green fire that's in your life and in mine. Billow. Float through green streams of smoke. Remember to look under the burning leaf.

Stone #34

On this cold, windy day the trees,
their bare branches stick brooms
sweeping clouds across the sky.

Stone #33

In the park, a man, coiled dreads, Tai Chi, a thick, slow snowfall, festive card kind, layering whitely anything upperside to the sky.

Stone #32

the milky sun shines gloss gold in the slush mud puddle in the pot hole of the street even if it doesn't in the sky

A Page for AROS at my Blogspot Blog with its Own RSS Feed

It's taken a morning of searching, but I now have a working page for aros, A River of Stones, my mini 140 character pebbles, and an RSS feed to that page (which is a label page):

http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/aros

You can find the label page for aros at the top of this page (or any page on my site, it's so cool).

Note: I was only able to find this feed, and subscribe to it in Google Reader through the orange browser feed button on your browser bar.

Also I was able to get Facebook to recognize and import the url of the feed into my Notes.


These two great articles by GXG tell you exactly how to do it:

Tranform a Blogger Label into a Page.

How to Add Label-Specific Feeds to Blogger



                                          

Stone #31

Anansi took the heat and put it in a pot and hung it in the silk cotton tree. That's why we have winter storms, I am sure of it.


                                          

Stone #30

A lit, white, outdoor patio curtain billows, and I, videotaping it, frighten the owner in my black hooded coat and huge Sorrel boots. The night blasts.

Stone #29: Opposite Women Who Are The Same

Spring generates below the frozen ground. The green, the brown rising. Darkly.


_
The stone, drawn from the stream-of-consciousness writing in the drawing.

In the endless greys, browns, taupes and whites of winter, I seem to be deeply missing the green! My subconscious offering compensatory imagery - or that's what it seems. Buried in masses of green.

While working on this drawing, I spilt half a bottle of olive green India ink, a colour that I had mixed from a sepia and a bright green, onto my La Cache tablecloth (the store no longer exists). That was a disaster. India ink is extremely permanent. Did I get it rinsed before doomsday in green? About 10 separate squirts of dish soap and rinses and me scrubbing with my hands. Finally I put it in a bucket with laundry detergent to soak.

Green floods my life.

I would say there is a black and a white sister here. They are a study in contrasts. Two very different lives and takes on life. Yet they are the same woman.

The drawing is overdone, I think. I began by using some pens that contain archival ink but work like markers and discovered that I don't really like them. At least now I know I prefer the more unsure and difficult ways ink flows from the nibs of fountain pens or dip pens. So much of what happens when it doesn't begin quite right is that you spend a lot of time 'saving' the work - a process that is sometimes successful, sometimes not. I added eggshell-coloured framing digitally. I like the close-up in the last scan.

_
Dark Women, 2011, 20cm x 28cm, 8" x 11", India inks with dip pen and various fountain pen inks.

Scrawled, embedded words:

Who are we in our shadows? Explore a darker terrain. Welcome complexity, seething underbed where spring is already generating below the frozen ground, snow-filled land of ice. The green, the brown rising. Darkly. Look at the half-seen and explore the invisible. Does mystery make us apprehensive? Go deeper. Plunge.

Wrote the words that are embedded in the drawing next to it so that I would remember what they were. Yes, could be edited down, but later. The eggshell framing lines are drawn digitally.

I like the detail, click on it - it looks better larger.

Stone #28

...when the light casts two shadows, and you hear footsteps within footsteps, and you realize you're following yourself...

Stone #27

the draft you deleted | remains an absence | in the final version || deleted images | indelible absences | in what remains

or:

the draft you deleted
remains an absence
in the final version

deleted images
indelible absences
in what remains