And it might not be on dancing, dreaming, or disappearing...
Dance, the Dream, Disappearing Into Each Other, 8.5"x11", watercolour pencil on paper, 2006.
Scrawled along the blue woman's leg: "shadow my desire"; up the older woman's arm, "what rises into the self?"; and curling from thigh to breast to arm, "repose curls in on itself."
link to borderless image
I think your work foregrounds the interplay between notions of beginning, end, and boundary. Where does one begin and another end? What are the boundaries of being? When is "one" really "two" and two, one? What's more, it seems to me that in working with the female body you access an energy in motion, fluid, and open to the blend of being/becoming/having been - a place where the meaning of time slides with the possibilities emerging for blended and distinct identity/identification. ... those are my first and fast thoughts. I love this piece. -mg
ReplyDeleteMary, I think your comment better than my painting! I love it! Boundaries, being, identity, yes, oh yes. As background, the three women are tracings of sketches from the same lifedrawing session and are all the same woman. How one appears older, one younger, one as a blue sylph I don't know. It is a focussed meditation on what the self is, how we transmute into each other, what the dance that we're dancing is. Your comment more than inspiring -*! xo
ReplyDeleteI find this particularly beautiful, though I don't - I'm afraid - have words to contribute. I think images and words mostly don't interleave for me the way they do for you, though I couldn't bear to be without either...
ReplyDeleteJust found this photoblog,which made me think of you: http://ossiane.blog.lemonde.fr/ossiane/
Jean, that word, "interleave," what a magnificent word. It's perfect, too. Even for this drawing, where the figures interleave.
ReplyDeleteYour comment, a gentle, sensitive response...
Ossianne's site is beautiful. While regretfully I don't read French, I do like the way, after displaying the untouched original, she maps her photographs with energy lines of words, emphasizing language, its textualities, what we signify our world/ourselves with...
Thank you. xo
I keep looking at this, trying to sort out who is appearing where and disappearing, head becoming hip, leg becoming arm, shoulder becoming leg... Revelation to realize they're all the same woman.
ReplyDeletemb, well, we only have one sketch book with a thick enough bond to do watercolour pencils here, so the figures, or one figure in different poses, got, ah, superimposed... :)
ReplyDeleteI never pre-plan, do you? (meaning poetic images, which the figures may be-) There's a tao to the way one thing leads to another...
:grinning: xo
No, I love the interrelationships! That was not a criticism in the least. I enjoy contemplating this and seeing how one appears to "grow into" the next. Interconnectivity and metaphor fascinate me, obviously. I'm amazed you can draw/paint that way.
ReplyDeleteAnd no, I don't preplan. Sometimes I have a seed to start with, a sprout. Sometimes I go back to tighten connections and to pare, pare, pare. (Although everything on my blog is rude and crude, fast and relatively untouched because that's the function of the blog —think of the difference between the rough draft and the final poem at Q, for example). But no, it all unfolds in front of me pretty much, and I follow. The way of the Tao...
mb, no, I didn't think there was any criticism, implied or otherwise... sorry if my response sounded that way, wasn't meant to.
ReplyDeleteYes, there is always a seed, an image, a line, an idea for a drawing, but, like you, after that I let whatever images there are suggest the next ones, not trying to prune too much till it's finished. Also I find writing in pencil in my notebook better than composing on screen (although all editing is done on screen).