Wind Over Grass

Wind Over Grass, 2009, 14"x10.5", 35.5cmx26.5cm, India ink (with a dip pen), and oils (paint and pastel) on a primed canvas sheet. I based a larger painting on this, which is included in the photo album, Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass.

The figures in this drawing were originally from a drop-in life drawing session in 2005! After some years I transferred the sketch to a small primed canvas sheet. Then lines of bright oil paint, which I rubbed out to a pastel hue. That hung on a wall in the hall for a few years. Yesterday I grabbed it, deciding I couldn't stand seeing it anymore, and if I wrecked it, the garbage would be fine. Wetted water-soluble oil pastels, clumsier than brushes, but colour-bright, follow those lines of force, curves of bodies and landscape. Then my dip pen, old trusty pen, and a bottle of permanent India ink. No going back! No rubbing out! Don't spill the ink! I move it around my crowded desk, trying to keep an envelope under it, scratching lines in, over and over, a wind of lines flowing. I am in a trance almost, another state of consciousness, more primal, less 'thought'-ful, empty, an energy of muted frenzy emerging from the pen tip. I am not-me. I pass the point of no return. Then stop. I'm happier with the drawing, in the flush of finishing, but who knows?

Contact dance - the points of tension in the parts of your bodies that touch, and the flow of energy so that you know where the motion, the flow, your combined flow, is going. It is about the touch, and the space between you, and the flow of intuitive movement. Wind Over Grass is an exercise where one person stands as a blade of grass and the other runs to them as wind and gently touches them, anywhere on their body, touching lightly with any part of their body, the side of the palm, chin, back of the shoulder. The grass bends, sways, curves. Then stands upright as again the wind sweeps in again.

When we practice Wind Over Grass, our bodies become part of the landscape. Two years after I last worked on this drawing, it didn't hit the garbage, but is back on the wall in the hall. Hopefully, with lines of telluric energy finally moving.

All the previous drawings are here, as well as a painting that I began, but haven't finished, that's sitting on another wall (le sigh): Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass.

                              

Perigee Moon

From Perigee Moon

Metamorphosis Under the Moon, 2010, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil pastel, oil paint pen on paper. Click image for larger.

Perigee Moon

Under the full moon,
she mutates.

Her arms, bone
twigs become wing feathers.

Red hair flaming in the white light.

A riptide of ocean
in our blood
pulls to the surface,
this night of imaginings.

Moonlight glosses the lake.

The white muse moon pours magic.

Under the full moon we see
in the dark, our dreaming eyes open.

Pastel on black paper, my fingers dance.

The women sculpt each other.

A creatrix is born.

She is a wild woman.
In the circle of wild women.
In the wilds, where we transform.

Among the night animals,
owl, wolf, jaguar,
where our breath roars,
whispers, sings,
where our visions
transform us.

_

Pastel sketch done in a DanceOurWayHome 'Dreaming in the Dark' session yesterday afternoon, January 30th. Poem written today. The perigee moon this year was very bright; we saw it under clear skies.

February 14th, update: Last night I wrote the poem on the pastel with a Sharpie paint pen that malfunctioned - splats! and so dipped the pen into deliberate splats on another sheet of paper and wrote the poem. Oddly, the words seem scratched on with a feather, perhaps dipped in a splat of white moonlight... :)