pre-Hallows' Eve

Starting to put together 'a look' for Halloween...

   

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Oct Poetry & Music Salon photos

The October Salon! Was wonderful!!!! Many thanks to Karen Shenfeld for hosting a beautiful Salon, and to Isabel Fryszberg and John Oughton, fabulous features, and the open mics - Bänoo Zan, Sean Mc Dermott, Norman Bethune Allan, Milel BC and Cate Laurier and Neil for sharing their poems! Many thanks to Deb and Aliya of Markham House City Lab who welcomed us and helped figure out where to seat us (since 'the room' was populated with sculptures and so we had to move) and made coffee for us too! xoxo to all!

For names, please visit the Picasa Soirée album.


                                                                                                       
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This Saturday! Oct 24th Poetry & Music Soirée: 4-6pm

A Salon Saturday afternoon! Hosted by my friend, Karen Shenfeld! Love to see you!

Because the inestimable sculptor and painter Tony Urquhart rented the Charotte Hale Gallery (current home for my Salons) this month, we are having our Poetry and Music Soirée just up the street at Mirvish Village - Markham House (610 Markham St)! This is the house Westbank renovated as a showcase for their proposal for Mirvish Village - you can see a model on the ground floor - but we will be upstairs where there is a lovely, bright gallery. Karen Shenfeld, brilliant, warm, wonderful, is hosting this month, and her features are poet John Oughton and singer/songwriter Isabel Fryszberg!!! Open mic spots too! It's 4-6pm, so you can start Saturday night was some cultcha...! After, we'll cross the street and go to the Victory Café for coffee, drinks, dinner, camaraderie.

Karen's invitation to you all:

Hello friends!

I am hosting an intimate afternoon Poetry and Music Salon, next Saturday, from 4 PM to 6 PM, in Mirvish Village. I will be reading a few poems to start the afternoon off. The feature poet will be John Oughton, an excellent colleague who was, like me, a former student of Irving Layton's. The feature singer/songwriter will be the multi-talented Isabel Fryszberg, with whom I have also worked on documentary films.

Plus: there will be lots of open mic spots. So, if you would like to read a poem or two, you would be welcome to do so, so long as you get there early enough to sign up.

After the reading, those who wish, can join me and the usual event host, Brenda Clews, for drinks and/or dinner at The Victory Cafe.

Cheers,

Karen

Here are short bios of our main features:

Isabel Fryszberg is a renaissance woman; a singer songwriter, documentary filmmaker, fiddle player, lover of applachian music and an occupational therapist. Based in Toronto, Isabel Fryszberg is a founding member of the award-winning klezmer-swing sextet, Sisters of Sheynville. In 2014, she released her solo debut CD, Hearts and Arrows. Reviewing it, Lenny Stoute of Cashbox Magazine wrote: “If you came for the voice and the heartbreak, Isabel delivers the goods with an uncommon authenticity.” Isabel Fryszberg was recently awarded a community arts grant from the Ontario Arts Council to record original songs with Don Kerr in collaboration with the members of the Creative Works Studio. Isabel founded Creative Works Studio in Toronto to help people with mental health and addiction issues find creative self expression through music and visual arts.

John Oughton was born in Guelph, Ontario, a block away from the home of John McCrae (author of “In Flanders Fields”). He completed a BA and MA in English at York U., where he studied with Irving Layton, Eli Mandel, Miriam Waddington and Frank Davey. After a half-year stay in Kyoto, Japan, he worked at Coach House Press and as a journalist and corporate communicator. He attended the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and served as a research assistant to Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. John began teaching English in community colleges, and is now Professor of Learning and Teaching at Centennial College. He has published a mystery novel, Death by Triangulation (2015) five books of poetry, most recently Time Slip (Guernica Editions), several chapbooks, and over 400 articles, interviews, reviews and blogs. John is a long-time member of the Long Dash writing workshop. He is also a photographer with three solo shows and several book and magazine covers.

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Our soirées are a late afternoon gathering of poets and musicians at an art gallery in Toronto. Brenda Clews hosts this beautiful event, which occurs on the last Saturday of the month from 4pm - 6:30pm (most months). We have a music and a poetry feature and about 8-10 5min open mic spots interspersed throughout the hours. All forms of writing are welcome, as well as music. The Soirée is free, but we do pass-the-hat for the features. Our salons are always warm, convivial, supportive and very talented afternoons and I would love you to come out and enjoy a marvellous couple of hours and perhaps share a poem, short story or song of your own. Please put the recurring date on your calendar.

poetry and music soirées Facebook Group page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poetryandmusicsoiree

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'Metamorphoses: In Rodin's Studio' at the Musée des beaux-arts in Montréal (iPhone 5s pics)

It wasn't the finished bronzes that were of interest, rather the plasters, the drawings, the assemblages of pieces of broken or 'unfinished' sculptures into new sculptures, the photographs, the way Rodin composed prior to.... that drew me to Montréal this week to see 'Metamorphoses: In Rodin's Studio' before it ends this Sunday (Oct 18) at the Musée des beaux-arts.

  

One of my favourites was a Walking Man (Rodin did a few), an assemblage of a torso from an older, unfinished John the Baptist sculpture and his legs from yet another sculpture, both joined without polishing and finishing the upper to match the lower. I sketched it while at the gallery, photographed and videoed it numerous times.


                                                                                                                   

Before I went to Montréal, I purchased (and read) the catalogue through Indigo Books. Though quite expensive, the book is stunningly illustrated with many full page photographs from Rodin's studio taken by his photographers, and will only add to your library of beloved art books.

August Rodin (1840–1917) completely revitalized the very language of sculpture with his passion for the creative act. The ongoing interplay of accident and chance in his fragile plasters, bronzes, marble figures, drawings, watercolors, and photographs speak to an endless flow of creation. Rodin’s “studio,” however, must be understood as the small artistic community that worked for and around the master. It consisted of practitioners of specific trades to whom we owe the transformation of one material to another, one dimension to another, under Rodin’s attentive guidance. This book, which accompanies a major traveling exhibition, sheds light on the sculptor’s process and takes stock of his prodigious creativity. It also features masterpieces like the 200 or so figures fleeing in The Gates of Hell, a work Rodin would draw from for the rest of his career, and The Walking Man.
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