Saturday, May 23, 2009

Celestial Dancers webpage


Celestial Dancers


It's taken 8 hours to put the Celestial Dancers webpage up... these images are from 2004, during the time when I was painting those paintings. Silly, & fun.

I 'lost' the entire file of images in my Picasa folder on my computer, after hours of scouring two hard drives in search of them. I tried to delete one repetition and somehow managed to 'hide' the entire folder - oh, I could see it in Finder alright, but couldn't open anything, or access it in any way. Picasa finally relented when I asked to 'see' all 'hidden folders.' But by then I had two albums up on Picasa on the web and who knows what's what anymore. I'd better leave them, both with the same images but probably different URLs, otherwise images will disappear :-)

Friday, May 22, 2009

Love Letters on Sand Manadalas (1:01min)

Added a background of ocean & shells to this older recording for the Photopoem page of my Art & Writings website. An improvement over the plain voice in this one. I worked on this recording (shells & distant tinkling bells are mine) because I thought this poem needed some 'pizzaz.'

(But, yes, I forgot to 'master fade out' & this version is gone because I continued fiddling in garageband & saved a later version... it bothers me, but, ahhhh, it's late... & I did manually 'fade out' each of the six tracks (yes, yes, there are that many)...


        
Love Letters on Sand Mandalas, 2005..............click to play
(click on this image
to enlarge)
















Thursday, May 21, 2009

I have to be formless to write; dissolved to paint; non-existent to create. It's always a risk.

But an aesthetic operates. The aesthetic, way of shaping, what negotiates the creative forces and the tools, the diverse & complex language structures, the brush of paint by a sable brush on canvas, how far the back will bend in the speed of the movement, offers structure to the emerging poem or painting or dance.

It's like trying to hold a sail in a high-force wind.

Sometimes we just can't make it.
Sometimes we do.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Rebirth, 1989



When I taught yoga in 1987, since I was following a theme of how to unite one's lifepath and soulforce, I used to bring "SoulCards," and we each picked one, and then spoke on what it reminded us of, or what message it might contain that would help us in our direction.

When I pulled this card, I knew, after my marriage had ended, that I had to open all the closed places within and re-find myself as an artist and poet, and continue on whatever strange and difficult but hopefully fruitful path that would take me.

I painted the image that you see above onto the large canvas I began working on, and from which I have posted an Angelic Whorl. She is a flying, whirling seed who has landed, who must begin the process of what would turn out to be a long, and painful rebirth, a process which still hasn't completed itself, ten years later.


Handbook
Deborah Koff-Chapin

Dance of the Solar Wind (2:28min) makes it to #2 of 1,929 on SoundClick poetry chart


Poetry recording site:
Aural Pleasure.
















Monday, May 18, 2009

Dance of the Solar Wind (2:28min)



A recording of a prosepoem. While I made the recording in 2007, I never posted it. This morning I played with it in Garageband, adding loops (actually, this is the first time I have ever done this - a new direction perhaps). Surprisingly, I like it. Not sure about the image, oh, not the sun, the sun is beautiful in its golden fields of fire, but, hey, I don't have a whole lot of images of myself.

Read the text here.

















________________

DSL or Cable

Dial-up

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Photopoems

Home Videopoetry Celestial Dancers Photopoems Birthdance Bliss Queen Bio Earth Rising Links Comments

A photopoem page is now up.

My kids are at their Dad's, but will my dog forgive me? It's nearly 11pm and she still hasn't had her walk!

The photopoem page is okay, I'm not crazy about it. I embedded a slideshow, and then a selection of photopoems in a hidden table below that open out to new windows if clicked on. The table that they are in is being sticky about its left margin and not giving me enough leeway to space the photographs as I'd like. It's not bad. Servicable, as they say.

It's nice to get the ones I liked best in one place. I've tried to embed the 'poem' in the photograph "info" and Picasa kindly unfolds that in text below the image at the album at Picasa's site, but centred, which is a bit weird.

Anyway, I've been at this since lunchtime (which I forgot to eat, though I did throw some eggs in a pan for dinner), between locating the images, updating info, resizing, saving into a new file, and then trying to figure out the html - yes, I pasted all of them in the table in the html box. Way easier that way. I use "Stickies" on my desktop and find it very handy to paste URLs and codes and stuff, and that's where I worked out the html for the images.

It's a matter of keeping organized, isn't it.

It feels like I'm organizing work mostly over the last 3 or 4 years, but am finding things that go further back than that.

A kind of scrapbook of my path to here, I suppose.

'Night all! Oh, oops, doggie walk first!

xo


Serpent Rising: "Promethea Un/Bound: The Thirty-Six Million Year Old Turtle"

A new webpage: Earth Rising.

Earth Rising

I was looking for an image on my old hard drive, and found this writing, "Promethea Un/Bound." I'm glad this piece wasn't lost. It is the only time I have ever written about a temp job, and if you read it you will see that it is composed of an inner dialogue. It was in a protected post at another blog site for a month or so, in August 2004, and it's been completely private/hidden for nearly 5 years since then.

In the piece, I am in intense dialogue with Hélène Cixous', The Book of Promethea, trans. Betsy Wing (University of Nebraska Press, 1991), and a 36 million year old turtle.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Angel of Links






It's amazing to find these old paintings and how they 'work' as sidebars, or backgrounds, or navigation buttons, or whatevers, for my new Art & Writings Website.

This one will (yes, yes, a self-portrait from perhaps around 1989 in a large painting of about 5 self-portraits in varying guises as I attempted to re-find the painter within who had disappeared for a decade at that point). She 'oversees' a "Links" page.

And links to whose sites will I place there? Oh, this is so exciting!












trying a simpler version, wishing I could make this into a card (painting from 1989, photo of rose probably 2004, prosepoem & recording from 2006, put together in 2009)

recording of this poem
(or click the 'click to listen rose':)

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Navigation Buttons for Website

Home Videopoetry Celestial Dancers Photopoems Birthdance Bliss Queen Bio Serpent Rising Comments

They may not look like much, but I spent the greater part of 2 evenings and a night composing and attempting not just to link these little navigation buttons to their respective pages, but to have mouse-over text appear too. My html was a mess! I had embedded them in tables and the tables became like little replicating viruses! They spawned more tables, secretly, until I discovered the whole webpage was within a large cell! Spreadsheets aren't called what they are for nothing, I learned.

If it wasn't for 'Liv' at Google Sites help, I'd never have managed the feat you see above. And a tech whizz called Steegle who's left very simple guides to specific html needs in perfect little web pages. Without those two, oh forget it.

Tables were all stripped. Yay! Even the big 'mother-sucker' got deleted away, sure it took a few tries but eventually it succumbed.

The NavBttns, isn't that a cute name, were touched up multiple times in Photoshop before coming to sit nicely in a row I can live with.

Yes, Google offers free websites. It'll be one of the most interesting journeys you'll ever make!

My website is coming along, yes siree, and tonight I be happy with it.

Monday, May 11, 2009

A Calligraphy of Light in the Room


A Calligraphy of Light in the Room, May 2009

Recent photography (like, hmnn, yesterday, yes, I'm sure it was yesterday, when the light, the light... or the day before...).

In the room.
____
click on it

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Abrasion #2: by Joaquim Gil & Nuno Tavares


Abrasion #2, Created, Interpreted, Edited, Sound & Music by Joaquim Gil & Nuno Tavares, and I love their YouTube channel name: "Science Friction," (ScienceFrictionProds).


Abrasion #2 is brilliant! It's the BEST Butoh-inspired piece I have ever seen! While I may wish Gil & Tavares had uploaded it in HD for greater clarity, I am simply glad they have created a channel at YouTube and are sharing their work.

I sit here, in stunned amazement. There are videos, and videos. And suddenly, out of nowhere: art.

The images reverberate within me. I am deeply moved. The feel of the film, its archaic sepia abandoned warehouse setting, the drama between two men who live in near-naked isolation in an edifice that's becoming earth, a floor of stamped soil, the transition clips of lights and other strange phenomenon, like you see behind your closed eyelids when you're trying to sleep in a lit room, is an aesthetic I find gorgeously tactile, mythic.

Art that is magnificent, like a Tarkovsky, that great Russian filmmaker's palette and epic style, or Fellini's Satyricon, the abandoned building, the doubles, one white, one black. Two men. Their drama. Who are beautiful in this film. They are dancers, yes, but of the deep, vulnerable, inner spirit. In the strangeness of Butoh. Where it's raw, where movement is simplified, symbolic, intense. It's so intense! Emotion exploding out of this minimalist piece!

Gil and Tavares -are they the actors, the dancers? we don't know- added me as a 'friend' at YouTube, hence my checking them out... and I am so glad... I wish them great good fortune as a filmmakers!


[direct url: Abrasion #2]



___
Please note that in my continued sharing of works that I like I am posting comments (and usually enlarging on them) that I have left at sites along with the work.

Saturday, May 09, 2009

John F. Walter: 'The Room That Recurs'

Imagine these words etched on four walls by skilled hands
inside a calligraphy that effaced them and pointed to infinity,
regardless of what I or any other poet could have inscribed
within characters flowing out in currents of curls and loops,

our gilded vessels flourishing forth aglow with ancient light.
Envision the knots in polychrome tiles that framed these verses
and countless more swirled out here in a script whose letters
cognized as geometry when images failed to describe the world.

Blink. Shift your vision from flat crystallized squares--
turning sideways to cubes, then merging out of depth into octagons--
to a minute scale of witnessing. Eyeball blue, black, green tesserae,

like the rows of color pixels sprayed on the television screen
that you notice when you get up close and don't look through them
at the flicker synchronized with a scramble of voices.

Somehow these bits that tessellate along points, lines and planes
reveal how the walls they swarmed came to simulate a cosmos.

Gaze up at the starry roof. Don´t pretend my words matter there.
Language in time, prayer's isomorphs, this room: It's your own.

The Room That Recurs.

______

'The Room That Recurs,' a perfect title for this poem on the calligraphies of our souls etched on Islamic tiles in Sufi mystical lettering that bursts and disappears like sparks leaving phosphorescent trails in the air. A divine alphabet, "characters flowing out in currents..." glow of "ancient light." A history of the written word implied in the sweep of the poem, a poetry of the word: "a script whose letters/ cognized as geometry when images failed to describe the world." This in the sacred geometry of our recurring 'room': our perception, the "gilded vessel" of our bodies' consciousness.

As if viewing images of tiles in the Alhambra, zooming in until they are single pixels of colour without defined shape, "from flat crystallized squares" to "turning sideways cubes, then merging out of depth into octagons," on the "minute scale of witnessing" we see "Eyeball blue, black, green tesserae."

On the microscopic planes, we are in the abstraction of our lives of form.

The poetic vision shifts from standing before an art that effaces its makers for a vision of "infinity," from the rarefied past to the ubiquitous television screen.

When we arrive at the pixelated world of the screen and its moving images it's perhaps different, perhaps not. Look through the narratives, the stories transmitted through the medium to the nature of the screen itself, "the rows of color pixels sprayed," the "synchronized" "scramble of voices."

These "bits that tessellate along points, lines and planes" swarm to "simulate a cosmos" that may or may not be an entrance into reality any more than the Islamic temple of calligraphy that is art.

"Gaze up at the starry roof," the dome of stars. Our language swirls in time's unwinding even as our humble poem to the universe is an isomorphic prayer.

Inhabit your room (your dwelling space, where the energy of life and consciousness comes to reside) of light.

We inhabit ourselves.

When we open our perceptions to our calligraphies, scripts to limn the world.

Cosmic vision. Infinity in an azulejo, a pixel. Holographs, "prayer's isomorphs."

An affirmative and beautiful poem.

(And one of my favourite of John's poems.)


John F Walter





John F. Walter



Decorative Tiles,' or Azulejos, Alhambra, Granada, Spain

Friday, May 08, 2009

Bliss Queen Webpage

The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss, a long tantric poem I wrote a few years ago is now a webpage at my site - a webpage that took 15 hours to create! I didn't get to bed until 6am this morning, & then up again by 9:30am to continue... it's the clash of limited html skills & my aesthetic... the hunt through the night for html that would make appear exactly what I wanted... as the sun was coming up I gave up on my quest to find anything that would work for the poem given Google's coding limitations, and fell asleep for a few hours before getting up with an idea for how to circumvent my html illiteracies and created what I sought in trustworthy PhotoShop... and uploaded it as a .jpg already stitched to the website's background that it carries with it... because I wanted an underlayer of transparent darkness to offset the Buddhist robe kashaya safron colouring of the poem's lettering.

The webpage that you see now is delicately composed in a network of hidden tables...

... Which is actually one table with many cells, of all sizes and some of which appeared randomly & mysteriously without any purpose and wouldn't delete without taking the whole edifice with them - lucky for the 'undo' key!

Where spreadsheet meets esoteric spirituality!

In the webpage; in the webpage.

Bliss Queen

Just took 'a peek' at the 'View/Page Source'
and holy tantric goddess!

Now I know what creation is.

Computer code
the incantation of our time!

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Videotaped Reading: Mother of Milk, 2003

Mother of Milk, 2003 from Brenda Clews on Vimeo. (It takes 10-15sec to begin.)

I recorded this reading of "Mother of Milk" in my studio in Vancouver for ARM's 'Mothering, Religion and Spirituality' Conference.

Breastfeeding my two children until they weaned themselves, a total of five years, I went from filling my time with constant doing, a consumption of time, activities, ideas, to being able to be with the vast silence of the interior stillness. In this learning of a deeper rhythm which seemingly encompassed the discordant ambiguities, difficulties, discontinuities, traumas, and irreconcilable aspects, as well as the joys and unities, of my life my spiritual understandings and practices underwent a profound metamorphosis. While I would emphasize that there are many spiritual paths, and that all are equally valid, the particular path I found myself on arose directly out of my experiences as a mother-of-milk as I subsequently explored the concept of the ‘Divine Mother’ in ancient mythologies and modern religions, through meditation in a yoga tradition, and privately before my small alter at home, so that, while still emphatically a ‘woman in process,’ my experience of a feminist, goddess-oriented, empowering way of being could be be described as an ‘embodied spirituality.’

Videotaped in Vancouver, 2003
Copyright 2003 by Brenda Clews All Rights Reserved



______
This is the DVD cover.






This was a personal essay, or perhaps prosepoem of a certain point of motherhood, and I recorded it in my studio in Vancouver (where I lived at the time) for a conference on "Motherhood and Spirituality" in 2003 in Toronto. The viewing was well received. Afterwards the CD went underground, and was in at least one art show, in 2004, at the Ayer Lofts Art Gallery in Massachusetts where it was one of the features of a video evening. Oh, and the prestigious Mothers Movement Online published it as an essay around that time too, and it's still online.

With my new iMac (ok it's almost a year old, but still feels "new":-) I found I was able to save this video as a .DIVX file, shortening it from the Quicktime 1.4GB .MOV file to 172MB .DIVX while not losing clarity in the smaller screen (as happened with the .MP4 file), and, even though it's 21 minutes long, was able to upload it, not to YouTube (which has a 10 minute maximum) but to Vimeo (which has no limit on the length of a video, only a size limit of 500MGs a week).

Because of Google Sites html limitations I can only embed a teeny tiny flash player that plays the reading at my new Art & Writings Website, it's real cute!

Birth Paintings, 1986-1989



It's only taken me 10 years to do this! A slideshow. Large enough to see. A page at my Art & Writings Website. Even a price sticker. The option to order art prints is always available and preferable.


(Click on the slideshow anywhere to go to Picasa and view a 'larger show.' If you have Cooliris installed, then of course you can view at fullscreen.)

From Brenda Clews, Birth Paintings 1987-1989

______
Direct Link: Birth Paintings, 1987-1989

Monday, May 04, 2009

Women In Summer, 2008, Picasa Slideshow



Women In Summer, Oil paint, watercolour pencils, India ink on Waterford watercolour paper, 72.5cm x 52cm, 28.5" x 20.5"

I've posted a slideshow of the process of this painting before, but that was a Flickr slideshow (that I could only get to run backwards, if readers at that time recall), and this is a Picasa one (which runs forward very nicely, thank you Picasa). Apparently I did not keep the larger originals when I uploaded the series to Flickr. What. Else. Is. New. Hours spent searching on various hard drives and finally downloading what I'd uploaded at Flickr, and then uploaded to Picasa with embedded copyright info in each photo for the new Art Website.

Via an inserted 'Google Spreadsheet' I can get comments at my new Google Site art & poetry site! Sweet!

From Women In Summer - the process of painting



direct link to the slideshow: Women In Summer

Saturday, May 02, 2009

Women In Spring Slideshow for 'Under Construction' Art Website



Women In Spring, 2008

I've spent the last few hours locating these images between two computers, and attempting to represent the colour accurately by uploading, fiddling in Photoshop Elements, uploading... you get the idea. They are larger images than I have previously uploaded.

Hopefully in Picasa I'll figure out how to do 'individual slideshows' and then one large one since I am doing these for my new art website: https://sites.google.com/site/brendaclews/

For reasons I accept (if it's a team website the danger of images being accidentally deleted by any number of users is quite high), Google Sites does not allow you to delete images you've uploaded. So I'm going to host the images from Google's Picasa.

This painting is one of my favourites, and looks better 'in the painted flesh,' on my wall, than in the final image (perhaps I need to take a new photo of it), but I hope it imparts some joy to you.

There's a bunch of writing around it at the website on the main page.

Brenda's Art Website.

From Women In Spring - Brenda Clews

Friday, May 01, 2009

A new Art Website under construction

Creating a new art website. While it's just like the old one, it's not an easy task. I'm using a Google Sites Homepage, and its design seems for text-based rather than image-based websites. I tinker with html, of which I am only a rudimentary user. I re-do & upload photographs of paintings in Photoshop Elements until something approaching the original colour appears on-site, at least on my fabulous iMac screen- can't say for PCs, but you do only what you can do.

At least this website allows me to use textboxes (you all know how I love to write!), and to place whatever wherever.

Unfortunately, being hard-hit by the recession, I let my domain name lapse, thinking to move it eventually to Google, but some other company has snatched my name up and is using it as a portal to infernal advertising and no doubt is waiting for me to buy it back from them.

I don't care about it. Eventually no-one will click on it and they'll drop it and I can have it back again.

Never mind.

The old Tripod website is still up and a great site, but for an advertisement-based 'free' site, a 20MG limit, and I've reached it. Google's is 100MG. I'm giving myself a few months to transfer everything over, and add more work.

Anyway, enough blather, visit the constuction site here, but keep your hardhat on (images may come loose and fly). Enjoy!

Brenda's New (under construction) Art Website.


(screenshots using Apple's
"Grab" application)



I like the look, it's unique, or perhaps it's my strange aesthetic. Making a Google homepage site, though, is proving to be more difficult than any of the other web pages I've set up. It formats beautifully on my iMac, but the font is gone on a PC, and the page doesn't automatically format to fit a Netbook.

Also, because it's an application meant for a team website, once you upload an image you can never delete it, meaning you will run out of space quite quickly if you are setting up an art website.

Since I'm learning a lot, I'll continue. It may end up working out. Check it out and give me your honest feedback. Much appreciation...

xo

A solution to the image issue may be to upload the images to Picasa and embed the html at the Google sites homepage... I'll be uploading everything to Picasa anyway, for the slideshow option, and for glorious, delirious Cooliris.

(Google made images un-delete-able because these sites are often shared by a team & accidentally deleting images could be very problematic if you have a number of users. Which makes sense.)

Google Sites homepage: Art website

A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___