Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Sketch of a Cherubic Poet (1 min animation test)

A quick test of the animation feature of Sketchbook Pro. A little unlisted video.

I recorded the finishing of the drawing this sketch on my iPad Mini - the original sketch was begun last weekend.

This technology is incredible.


http://youtu.be/etv4fbYmBx0


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 brendaclews.com

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

My cat joins me while I dance to Pierre Marie Cœdès 'Concerto N°13'


direct link: My cat joins me while I dance to Pierre Marie Cœdès 'Concerto N°13'

Ok, yeah, I dance in my living room during or after yoga sets a few times a week. My preference is classical music to get the old bones moving and the energy up. When I mentioned in a comment on Facebook to Pierre-Marie that I was planning to dance to his latest concerto, N°13, he replied, "wow, I'm anxious to see that." So I set up a camera and put on his music and with nothing planned, started moving. There is no sound because I inadvertently turned it off when I was attaching an external mic. I downloaded his Concerto from SoundCloud and added the track.

A sweet young feline joins me - she is so adorable! My Aria. Usually she stalks and attacks my ankles when I dance but Pierre-Marie's music seems to have calmed her and she mostly purred.

I added some lighting effects to diminish the busy background and seem to have faded myself out too. Lol. And I left in the times I quizzed the camera. It's all a bit embarrassing. But neva mind!

In the spirit of fun, good exercise, and deep listening, a woman can tromp however she likes alone in her living room.

Pierre-Marie's music is beautiful to dance to. I hadn't heard this Concerto before and so nothing was pre-planned - simply allowing the music to move me.

CONCERTO N°13 COMPLET 3 Mvts by Pierre-Marie Cœdès is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence: https://soundcloud.com/pierremariecoedes/concerto-n13-complet-3-mvts



My cat goes for a twirl! She's adorable and loves to get in on the action when I dance.

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Pierre-Marie posted the video to his Facebook page with the comment: "Painter, poet, performer, among other things, and she dances too. My Friend Brenda Clews is a thousand facet woman, but first, she is a complete artist, expressing herself from head to toe, and even with her guts if it is necessary to achieve her goal. Nothing stops her… well… no, nothing up to know or to my knowledge. It is he second time she uses my music, just for pleasure here, and I had a 25 minute smile looking at her dancing, her cat wanting to be part of the fun. You are so full of life Brenda, I love you my Friend."

So, like whew! I didn't want him to feel embarrassed that a woman was prancing around her living room/studio to his finely wrought music! And was about to un-list the video, but...

I wrote: "I'm ever so glad you found the video charming in some small way, Pierre-Marie. Of course it doesn't do justice to your music, which I love! I posted it publicly though despite how dumb I look not just because of your beautiful and moving Concerto, but because little Aria stole the show. She is so cute! And I know you love cats... !"

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 brendaclews.com

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Clay Lady - short timelapse


direct link: Clay Lady - short timelapse

Timelapse and poem.

While I continue to test and compose different visual elements for the videopoem I am working on, 'Clay Lady,' this is now a small finished piece.

Sculpture, poem, video, editing, voice, sonics by Brenda Clews ©2014.

What I did rather late last night. Suddenly jumped up from my books, poems, drawings and created a scenario - metal leaf background, black cloth, stool, lazy susan, sculpture. Set my DSLR on high speed shooting, started twirling Clay Lady, and then I had a whole bunch of .jpgs. Earlier I had found a YT tutorial on how to make timelapse in FCP X, so imported the photos, fiddled with settings, did some cropping on one series, and ended up with this, which I am quite happy with. Having purchased the cheapest keyboard a local music store sells on sale last summer, I have, now, made myself compose two 'sonic tracks' for videopoems. I can't do music like a musician; I can only create sonics like a poet - thick sound streams full of the unsyncopated. The FCP X titles (which I normally don't use) were a bit of a strain since the background was white but I found some instructions by Googling that explained how to send a title to Motion to adjust it and so managed to delete the white background altogether and then imported it back in. It all took hours of course. I ran out to see the Tanaquil Le Clercq documentary too. Hopefully tonight I can try shooting video and turning that into .jpgs for timelapse just to see how reversing the process might work. I am, in these small projects, working on composing different visual elements for the videopoem I am working on, 'Clay Lady.'


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 brendaclews.com

monochroma #1



monochroma #1, Brenda Clews, 11.5" x 16.5", India ink, Moleskine sketchbook.

Last night I finally released myself to drawing or perhaps doodling in my big Moleskine, whiling away the hours while I browse the NET, watch art house films, chat with family or friends. This self-permission has taken about a year and a half. Don't ask why. I don't know.
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 brendaclews.com

Saturday, April 19, 2014

It's a Rainy Day and it's Okay

Ma nièce filmed and edited. Isn't he good looking? That's mon fils. :)}:)}

She's an OCADU art student who's exploring stop motion video on her own but she is considering film along with her fine art studies.


direct link: It's a Rainy Day and it's Okay

Film and editing: Tara Clews
Audio: Mr Blue Sky by ELO
Actor/Model: Adrian Henderson
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 brendaclews.com

Friday, April 18, 2014

Videopoem: Follow the Curve of Birth (2:48min)



direct link: Follow the Curve of Birth

The footage is Aurelia aurita, shot at Ripley's Aquarium in Toronto.

This time, I did the whole production: wrote the prosepoem, whispered it into the mic, composed the sound textures on a keyboard, shot and edited the video. ©Brenda Clews 2014.

One of my birth pieces, written when I was abandoning an academic stream and moving towards poetry and art ...revised for this videopoem.


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 brendaclews.com

Thursday, April 17, 2014

April 26th Poetry Salon: Michael Mirolla and Claudio Gaudio

On the last Saturday of every month, from 3-5pm, I will be hosting a Poetry Salon at Urban Gallery! We will have 2 or 3 features and of course Open Mic. Please put the recurring date on your calendar.

The next Poetry Salon is on Saturday April 26th. And what a line-up!



Michael Mirolla

Novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright, Michael Mirolla’s publications include a punk-inspired novella, The Ballad of Martin B.; three novels: Berlin (a Bressani Prize winner and recently translated into Latvian); The Facility, which features among other things a string of cloned Mussolinis; and The Giulio Metaphysics III, a novel/linked short story collection wherein a character named “Giulio” battles for freedom from his own creator; two short story collections: The Formal Logic of Emotion (translated into Italian as La logica formale delle emozioni) and Hothouse Loves & Other Tales; and three collections of poetry: Light and Time, the English-Italian bilingual Interstellar Distances – Distanze Interstellari, and the just published The House on 14th Avenue. A short story collection, Lessons In Relationship Dyads, is scheduled with Red Hen Press in the U.S. His short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology, while another short story, “The Sand Flea,” was nominated for the US Pushcart Prize.


Claudio Gaudio

Claudio Gaudio is a Toronto based writer born in Calabria. Studied literature and philosophy at York University. “Texas” a novel published by Quattro Books, is currently being translated into Spanish and, excerpted, by Francesco Loriggio to be included in an anthology of Italian Canadian writers to be released in Calabria, by Rubbettino Editore. His work has also appeared in ELQ (Exile Literary Quarterly), Rampike literary magazine and Geist.

Third Feature TBA

And Open Mic! Five minute spots, sign-up at 3pm.

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 brendaclews.com

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

A Peek Inside the Palace of Palaces: THE FORBIDDEN CITY at the ROM


Yeah, one of those nuts that takes 3 pages of hand-written notes on her tablet when she goes to a show at the ROM (you are not allowed to photograph or even draw the exhibits in shows like these - all locked up for the gift shop - you want, you buy - but taking notes is permissible). What you gonna do with me? KJ Mullins kindly accepted an offer to write an article from them for newz4u.net, and it's been published now. I wrote the review far too quickly. But hopefully it works for you. If people who read it go to see the show who might not have otherwise I will be exceptionally happy. It's a fascinating offering from The Forbidden City and well worth seeing.


"How can a museum in another city on another continent show the scope of the riches of the Forbidden City? The ROMs show has 250 treasures from the Forbidden City, of which about 80, including armour, textiles, paintings and calligraphy, have never travelled before. The ROMs choices are sparse against a total of 1.8 million artifacts in Beijing, and attempt to cast a wide net over the art and artifacts of the Palace.

How successful is this appetizer of an offering of the treasures of one of the world’s greatest museums?"

Go read the review, let me know what you think: A Peek Inside the Palace of Palaces: THE FORBIDDEN CITY at the ROM

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 brendaclews.com

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

A Peek Inside the Palace of Palaces: THE FORBIDDEN CITY at the ROM

KJ Mullins published an article I wrote on the Forbidden City show at the Royal Ontario Museum. My article has a different slant to that taken by most of the other reviewers for newspapers and on-line magazines, who didn't seem, overall, to be hugely impressed with the show. I do hope a few folks make their way to the ROM to see it based on my response. The offerings from the Forbidden City are well worth seeing.

A Peek Inside the Palace of Palaces: THE FORBIDDEN CITY at the ROM


fc-banner

 brendaclews.com

Saturday, April 12, 2014

Clay Lady (test video)

Since this is a test-run, a video-in-process, a test of the writing for what I hope to do in the 'real' one, you probably don't need to watch it unless you would like to offer a comment that might help me compose the final video.



direct link: Clay Lady (test)

During the Autumn of 2013, I attended a figurative sculpture session at the Toronto School of Art with Florian Jacot. Throughout the 13 weeks of sculpting from a live model, I took photographs. In December of 2013, I searched for a turntable to video the finished little sculpture spinning but did not include that footage in the video just completed (I have included a 25sec clip at the end of this post). Yesterday I finally set a painting on the floor of my living room as a back-drop, set up a Canon 60D, sat down and read from my notebook. It's off-the-cuff, no preparation, a test run. I also had composed a Picasa album last Fall documenting the progress of the sculpture and made that into a mini video and added it to the test video. Honestly, I am a procrastinator and hope that posting these video clips will inspire me to do the one I had planned, which will be a little more complex in its structure and have many more photographs and video of the sculpture itself.




Uploaded 14 Dec 2013: Only a test run... not using the right camera and not with the poetry I am composing for a videopoem on/of this figure sculpture.

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 brendaclews.com

Friday, April 11, 2014

Clay Lady test shot


Clay Lady (a video) - still from a test of the poem & talk. I'll probably upload the test vid too.
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 brendaclews.com

Tuesday, April 08, 2014

Poetry Salons @ Urban Gallery Continue

It's official: I will be hosting monthly Poetry Salons at Urban Gallery on the last Saturday of each month from 3-5pm. Urban Gallery is a wonderful gallery and I am most honoured to be asked to host salons and very happy to be part of the art scene developing at the Gallery. Thanks to Calvin Hambrook, Allen Shugar and Kaspara Albertsen!



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 brendaclews.com

Monday, April 07, 2014

Lady in Red Corset



Lady in Red Corset (or some such title), life-drawing @ Urban Gallery 1 Feb 2014 (but finished tonight), model: Manminder, by Brenda Clews, 11" x 15", charcoal, graphite, India inks, pastels, etc., on primed canvas sheet.

The red ink might still be sticky, wet enough, and it is photographed at night under daylight bulbs with sheets of mylar hung over them - in daylight, there would be more detail and the colours might be slightly different shades.

On another front, NaPoWriMo is going well, and I am managing to keep up - but posting privately.

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 brendaclews.com

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

Due to anxiety over those who fly by and swipe a line, an image, a concept, an approach, a theme and use it to build their own little poetry nests elsewhere on the NET without referencing their source or giving credit to me or my work, which happened constantly when I used to openly post my writing, I simply cannot post poetry here. As I move through the block caused by this behaviour of seemingly well-educated and ethical writers, and on the advice of my analyst, who I discussed the issue at length with, including names, sites, specific examples when I was still seeing him, I find I'd like to continue writing on-line.

So I will have to do it in a private blog.

I have, of course, been writing throughout but in bursts and then reading the poems in Open Mics around the city where, I know, no-one really listens - because it's too hard to and with say three featured poets and 10 Open Mics one can't place a single poem in a context to analyze its value and what can potentially be taken from it (if poets in Toronto did such a thing - my experience has been that those living in America do this frequently, Canadians tend to be more original) - and so that felt safe.

What I had hoped to do this month, the month of 'poetry,' is to take a photo or do a drawing every day and write a line or a stanza or a whole poem to accompany it.

So I might share the pictures here, and perhaps a little of the intent.

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 brendaclews.com

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

April is poetry month

Besides a (for me, heartbreaking) issue with Picasa albums and Blogger, which has kept me from posting, and may drive me from this blog ultimately, who knows,

I had wanted to write something every day for the month of April for poetry month, which I've never done before.

With other stuff going on in my life, I forgot entirely.

So I found something I scribbled on the 14th of March, which really encapsulates so very much and yet which, of course, maintaining the silence on my personal life that I have mostly adhered to in this blog, I will not speak about.


The world couldn't open up when I was being held under a viewpoint like that.

It's not much, I know. But it appears to be part of a growing series of poems that, in their entirety, give forth more meaning than I could offer here.

Oh, I am being opaque, and no apologies, and I may continue to post whatever here or in another totally private blog during this month.

I just hope the poetry nest-builders who fly by and grab lines or ideas or approaches and add them to their own writing with nary a credit leave me alone - now and/or in 6 months, when my stuff used to re-surface in theirs! One whiff of it, and I won't post anything substantial here.

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 brendaclews.com

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Ink Ocean featured at Art and Earth

Ann Marcaida featured my performance videopoem, Ink Ocean, at Art and Earth yesterday.


Responses to Ink Ocean:

  • "Wow, what a trip. You've made something passionate out of this collision of many technologies and layers. Thank you." John Oughton (who jammed the über cool inky ocean music) 
  • "GREAT WORK Brenda, really great. I enjoyed every minute of it, choreography, words, music, background video. WOW." Pierre-Marie Cœdès 
  • "You did a fine job of editing, regardless of the circumstances. The surrounding imagery works very effectively, together with your combined dance and spoken word performance and the music. You prevailed over the lighting limitation and static camera. The result is indeed moving, as well as imaginative." Allan Briesmaster
  • "Outstanding video effects, excellent message and a perfect musical accompaniment. I especially enjoyed the golden orange segment which you had earlier shared a preview of. Another great piece of artistic work." Bill Sprague
  • "Gorgeous! ....the poem, performance, and choice of costume are spectacular." Ann Marcaida

It's been called "an awesome video poem" (Stephen Sinclair); "very impressive" (Hana Barak Engel); "glimmer of gold at sunset...love is the twine that binds our bones....beautiful contrasts to the chaos" (Jennifer W); "I love it"(Poonam Chandrika Tyagi); "Ocean ink is fantastic. Bravo!" (Mawar Marzuki);

Ink Ocean is a poem on the Gulf Oil Spill -we hear the lament of the wild through the birds, fish, plants- a poem on us and our ways and on loving in an increasingly polluted world.

Ink Ocean was shot at a live performance at Urban Gallery (where my poempaintings show was - those are mine hanging on the walls) in January 2014. Sick with the flu afterwards, I spent days researching open domain photos and video of the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill and was often in tears at what I saw (like we all were that year). John, who jammed on his guitar to produce a kind of oceanic sonar soundtrack while I performed, said, of an earlier draft version of the video, that he thought I should try to keep the performance/movement the main focus. I decided not to bombard the viewer with graphic images of the oil spill and used various filters to present the photos and video I used so that (hopefully) they became part of the dance itself. We are immersed in the realities we create. Ink Ocean is an activist poem - but not stridently so - rather helping people to hear the cry of the wild and to care and to keep loving ourselves, each other, the world, so that we may all survive. I hope the poem and performance and video open channels of hope, that there are ways through what we are being told by scientists is the world's sixth mass extinction.

John Oughton jams on his electric guitar with his magic box of sounds as a musical accompaniment to the performance: http://library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/oughton/index.htm

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 brendaclews.com

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

First attempts at digital drawing...

Because I like to draw at poetry readings and many of them are in dark bars where there is not enough room to spread art supplies and there is not enough light to see your page, I started, this weekend, to explore drawing and painting apps on my (smallest, cheapest, non-retina, 2013) iPad Mini (purchased to show Gallery owners my work and it did get me the show at Urban Gallery almost immediately).

All of these sketches were done in each of the apps without looking at, let alone reading, the manuals, instructions or anything else. While I've never used any paint programs, I have used Photoshop for years and so it wasn't hard to figure out an instrument (pencil, pen, crayon, brush), a thickness, a colour. Of all of the programs, Brushes proved to be too hard to figure out - and will require a thorough reading of the manual at some point. I liked the animation video Brushes created of the drawing though I was not able to export it. They are all powerful programs that offer the artist a vast range of drawing and painting options instantly - just open your device, aim your stylus, and go!


The first one. Entitled Resurrection Man. Drawn in layers in Sketchbook Pro and assembled in Photoshop.

          

This was done in ArtRage. I like the first two filtered versions, a Noir and a Transfer, better than the original, in which too much blue predominates.

                       

Sketchbook Pro again. Only lines this time (orig to left, separated layers in the final version on the right). Trying to see how best to sketch - there is a short lag, and even then the lines don't always appear on cue. This drawing is a bit wispy for some reason (it wasn't on the device) and easily took three times as long as it would have with pen and paper. Flippantly called, 'Womans In Crinolines.' Digital drawing, any town, any size.



This one is done in Brushes. Now I know Brushes is a powerful paint program but I could hardly get it to work and am thinking it wasn't recognizing my Sensu brush stylus and simply going by pressure. I wasn't, for instance, able to get it to do detailed eyes - it just ignored my repeatedly laying down lines. While I like Brushes, I realize it's going to be (another, sigh) learning curve.



Not my best one so far, and it definitely looks 'digital' - no variations in line thickness, etc. -sort of like a marker drawing. Done in Sketchbook Pro with a stylus with a nib, the Adonit Jot Pro, which was much more responsive than the Sensu brush. My doggy after her walk today. Snooze time! :)]


This one was done in ProCreate with the Adonit Jot Pro stylus. The original is on the right, and the splitting of the layers was done in Photoshop on my Macbook Pro. (Yes, these programs will export a .psd file.) When I shifted the layers, 'he' went from being a man to a 'woman.' Intersex. Transgender. In and out of drag. Or 'she' is a woman who becomes a 'man.'  Intermeshed. Fluidities of gender.

Last night at our Ren Rev poetry workshop I tried to draw Norman Bethune and my lines were so hesitant and wispy, I see I have a long way to go. He was very sweet, and said he liked the sketch but learning how to draw digitally - at least 200 hours he estimated. And the final layer I drew, without which the sketch is pointless, has simply disappeared. It was there when I showed him last night; it's entirely gone this morning. I thought closing the app meant an automatic save (there are no save buttons anyhow). Apparently not. Can't get an answer Googling the issue either. Time to read the manual, I guess.

Having been at it only a few days, I'm not doing too badly (except for Norman's sweater and eyebrows, which disappeared).

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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 ___