Thursday, October 10, 2013

Packed and Ready to Go!

Can't believe I'm done! Ready for installation at The Gladstone Hotel tomorrow! All my paintings are stacked, a coat of varnish now dry, corners stapled on for travelling; I put up a price list page at my website and emailed the info to Jacques, who's curating the show. The dog is walked. My walls look bereft and empty of their colourful paintings. As I get these paintings ready for transporting tomorrow, I wonder which ones will come home after, and which ones won't. Art sales in Toronto have not been good overall this year. It's been a tough year for Galleries. Yet I linger over my paintings with love and care. It'll be a terrific show! I can't wait to see everyone else's work! More pics will be coming.



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 brendaclews.com

Sunday, October 06, 2013

Life-drawing: Paris Black @ Hittite Gallery on Nuit Blanche 2013




Paris Black @ Hittite Gallery on Nuit Blanche 2013, 7.5"x9.5", mixed media on 130lb neutral pH 25% cotton paper.

I haven't done any life drawing in awhile, and was hankering to do some. Can't really assess the drawing since many artists from the Realist school draw and paint Paris and their work is marvelous. I don't aim for anything close to a photograph, but I do like some likeness to the model. It's if-y here - he's older than he appears in this drawing, and yet anyone who knows Paris and the many drawings and paintings of him floating around Toronto would know who this is.

In one year, since beginning his own group, the Epique Lounge artists group, he was chosen as a top International model by The Louvre and will be posing there at the end of October. And in China he was picked as top model of the year and flown there for drawing sessions.

He's a talented rock star, a brilliant man, an artist himself, and his focus, he says, during the exceptionally long sits of modelling is to focus on the artists doing the very best work they can.

He's a great guy, and a friend.



Paris Black Posing @Hittite Gallery Nuit Blanche 2013 -photo by Luis Arellano

Here's a cell phone pic of the life-drawing event. That's my hand in the lower right corner. :)

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 brendaclews.com

Saturday, October 05, 2013

Figure Sculpture, Week 2 (more photos)

Figure, 2013, 17" or 18", Week 2, rough draft, Klean Klay (I think) iPhone4 photo. First time I have ever sculpted a figure, so be gentle!



The last image, posted yesterday also, was photo manipulated with a filter.
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 brendaclews.com

Friday, October 04, 2013

Sculpture of a Woman in-progress

I've never sculpted a figure before. This is the 2nd session, with maybe a dozen sessions to go. Hey, it's close to Halloween (those wire arms!). It's intriguing, this process of clay and sculpting from life, and very challenging. An iPhone pic that I used a filter on. She's about 17" or 18" tall (if she were to stand).



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 brendaclews.com

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones, 2010-2013


Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones, 2010-2013, 24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, oil, acrylic, gold leaf on stretched canvas.

So much has been going on that I haven't written about in my blog. One whole wall of my living room is now a working studio, and as I was moving canvases I came across this one. And began working on it again. That's it for now... it's taken days, delicate work ...photo is best I can do at the moment - it was taken in direct late afternoon sun, colour not bad but not quite the shine you'd see if you looked at the painting.

Below, a slideshow of the past of this painting.



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 brendaclews.com

Friday, September 13, 2013

I woke up this morning remembering my mother...

I woke up this morning remembering my mother, who passed away a year ago today. I am glad she is not still in the nursing home going through what she was going through. She died at 89, after a long life - the way it's supposed to happen if we are lucky enough. The grieving through the last year has been different than for my Dad, who died too young at 62 of an illness he fought against as hard as he could. I am not haunted by the months of her dying the way I am still by my father's. She was ready to go. Surely to live long enough to reach a place of acceptance of one's natural death is an inestimable gift. Yet I have still grieved, and acutely at times. I think it is only this week that good restful sleep has begun to return. They say grieving is 4 seasons, a whole year, before you open again fully to the life you are living. It doesn't hurt so much; I can walk by the nursing home where she passed away peacefully on a beautiful warm, sunny day and feel grateful that she has escaped its confines. There is peace.
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 brendaclews.com

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

self-portrait photo



Selfie last night... if the new fashion is wide frizzy hair, why all I have to do is comb mine (though you can't quite see how wide it gets in this late night bathroom mirror pic). Ran the iPhone 4 shot through a few filters, still a bit on the yellow side.

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 brendaclews.com

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Split Mask

Had this prose poem public for awhile, thought I could handle it. But I've encrypted it. Sorry.

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 brendaclews.com

Saturday, September 07, 2013

Cate Blanchett Possesses the Screen in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine

Cate Blanchett inhabits her character, Jasmine, in Woody Allen's latest movie, Blue Jasmine. It is her story, and she grasps it in her teeth like a gold dollar and does not let it go even when it dissolves into dust. She possesses the screen. Her collapsing world is revealed through a babble that Jasmine addresses to anyone who will listen. We see flashbacks along with her attempts to create an afterlife to the life she had. She plays her character with a sharp, complex, brilliant fervor that dips in and out of an acerbic snobbery and a madness that is aware of itself and yet is unable to surmount itself. Jasmine attained the status of wealthy socialite by marrying a Wall Street financier (Hal, Alec Baldwin) whose companies were a construction of empty cards and the dizzying fall into shame and poverty with a fractured hubris only Cate Blanchett could convey. Characters destroy each others’ lives through financial usury. The aftershocks of embezzlement lie at the heart of Blue Jasmine. This is the story of what happens after the swindlers have moved through people's lives and left them destitute. Woody Allen, with references to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, weaves a story of facades covering facades with the fierce, raw emotion of a volcano of a woman boiling at the center.

Woody Allen, the aged and beloved comedian, a prolific filmmaker who... READ MORE


(My article/review on Blue Jasmine was published by KJ Mullins, the editor of newz4u.org.)
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 brendaclews.com

Sunday, August 25, 2013

'Ravishing Light' performed @ LyricalMyrical Festival last night


direct link:Ravishing Light @ LyricalMyrical Festival.

My second 'clip-on mic' poetry and creative movement live performance, 'Ravishing Light,' @the LyricalMyrical Festival hosted by publisher, Luciano Iacobelli, @Q Space in Toronto. The 3-day festival of LyricalMyrical authors (over 30 featured) is the last event before it closes down in a few days. We all hope Luciano resurrects Q Space at another location at some point in the future. His cafe has been a warm, welcoming, accepting, nurturing and enjoyable space for poetry in Toronto and many of us will miss it greatly. Many thanks to my brother, Allan Clews, and my friend, Jacques Albert, who took video. I edited the clips the morning after.








All photos from the video: two as is; two photoshopped.
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 brendaclews.com

Friday, August 23, 2013

LyricalMyrical Festival this weekend!

Ok. 7-10 minute spot at the LyricalMyrical Festival tomorrow night, Aug 24th, slated for around 9pm, and I promised to bring people so .... ahem, yah! Check. Clip-on mic tested and working. I have a large black cloth to wear for the first short poem, and a gold prop I made this afternoon! I was glueing gold light down - well, not quite. But I am quite resourceful! you'll see (hope to convince someone or other to take video of it for you to see my antics) - and then, as requested, I'll be wearing the mask and that outfit in the photo below to perform my poem, 'A Floral Opera.' Timed at about 7.5 minutes tonight, but you think I can remember the lines. LOL. Already nervous! getting performance anxiety a good 24 hours ahead of schedule. Just joking! It'll be a fabulous evening! Tons of great readers - 33 poets with LyricalMyrical chapbooks over the whole weekend! A blast of a farewell to Q Space (382 College St, Toronto - the LyricalMyrical Festival will be the last event held there).


I did a phone in 'shout out' about it on Nik Beat's CIUT radio show, Howl, last Tuesday night from the park - the last 10-12 min of the show. The link is to the latest show, so listen before Wednesday if you have it in mind to listen.

Oh, and a link to my LyricalMyrical chapbook, 'the luminist poems,' published this year (there are only 5 copies left before we go into a 2nd print-run!). Come September I am going to try to do more promo for it, try, try, will, soon. Lol.

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 brendaclews.com

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Split Mask

Working on a new mask.... the photos, a take on the cell handheld self-portrait.




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 brendaclews.com

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 ___