Blogger's movie has a charm, yes it does. In that smallness. Tree Bird Moon is also secretly -only not so now- uploaded
to Picasa. If you click on the image below you will go to a
decent size and resolution of the 23 second movie:
Below, one of the slides I didn't use in the slideshow movie,
which was very short, and this slide whipped by too quickly
(click for a larger size, the scribbler site has potential,
I tell you it does):
White fire spills from
the cauldron of the night,
where spirits gather
before they arrive
and after they return.
I wanted to show my brother how easy it is to make a slideshow movie in Picasa (for the desktop). As I was waiting for him, I started to collect a sample of benign images. He was held up. I ended up making a tiny movie out of some scribbles I did in the winter. Then I recorded a few lines from Wear White Paint for the Moon, fiddled a bit to get some reverberation going, added a bit of Bamboo flute in the background, and here you have it.
In honour of Mother's Day. Paintings and poem may be found at my website: BIRTHDANCE
On the paintings:
THE BODY IS FOR BLOSSOMING
...pigment of flesh flowing under my fingers, magenta, alizarin crimson, cerulean blue, cyan green, cadmium yellow, dark violet, colour so rich it's almost edible, bodyscapes of colour, landscapes of fertility, erupting in the swirl of water and paint...
When I was pregnant, my body changed in fundamental and drastic ways. It was a crisis: the freedom of an old self was dying to make way for the mother I would become.
The "Birth Series" paintings became a visual journey of my changing body, a way to comprehend what I was undergoing in the tumble of hormones as my belly grew. The paintings focus on the woman who conceives and carries a baby into life, who nourishes and awaits the child who will hopefully emerge from the nine-month gestation of her body like a dream become real.
In reaction to an increasing invisibility in the world: the averted gaze, perhaps arising out of a cultural discomfort with the swollen belly, I wished to present the pregnant body as sensual and sacred. Despite my desire to confound the categories of alluring woman and maternal body, I found myself deep in the mystery of creation itself.
At the beginning of the series, the body is portrayed clearly; as the forces of labour, birth and then breastfeeding unfold, the clarity shifts into flowing colours suggesting the transformative experience that carrying and delivering and breastfeeding a baby is.
These paintings are about a rite of passage, about the strangest body on earth, about the mind-blowing transformation of skin, belly, heart and perception of the self, as a woman ripens and delivers her fragile and beautiful fruit, the newborn, a miracle of the world.
On the poem:
BIRTHDANCE took two years to write. In 1987, after my first child, my son, was born, I tried to write about birth. At the time, I was unable to find any poetry or literature by women on what giving birth 'felt' like, on their inner birthing experience, and I wasn't sure how to express those powerful birthing hours. It took some years, and many revisions as I worked towards how to express this powerful moment of my life, and finally chose to allow the stages of labour to structure the poem. Each woman has a different experience of birth, the many stories, poems and artwork by women in the last decade or two have been an important sharing of what was previously hidden.
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The Birth Paintings and BIRTHDANCE were painted and composed from 1986-1989.
a fragrance of bouquets of petaled crabapple flowers
into a pink florae of wild apple-scented beauty
feathers of blossoms pass us by
do you see what deeply peers?
These are stills from a video where I gently shook the camera - manually, no Photoshop filters. The final one is my favourite. (Click photos for larger size)
I also experimented with Picasa's 'slideshow movie' capabilities and was impressed. I uploaded this .43sec video directly from Picasa to YouTube, and you'll see if you play it full screen that the resolution is excellent.
Doggles and I walked 6 kilometers today through Toronto neighbourhoods unexplored before. With a thermos of Earl Grey tea, steamy, redolent with bergamot orange, and kibble and water for her, we stopped at three lush parks while I sipped and she sniffed, nibbled grass and chewed sticks. I took a shaking-camera video of a crab apple tree in blossom. Music from Mali the whole way -yeah I was wired, that kora, man it's beautiful. We came home after 3 hours. She's 11 this Summer and aging extremely well, I must say.
