the poets are coming

Trying a different style because I need to find another way to draw at poetry readings. Relying on the style that is developing for life-drawing sessions, as I have been, is not working - poets giving readings of their work don't pose, the angle is usually not interesting, and so on. Today I picked up some art markers, the kind with fine points at one end and brushes at the other and which use archival permanent inks. I think I will work with my ongoing theme of multiples, multiplicity.

the poets are coming, 2013, 9"x 12", 22.9cm x 30.5cm, art markers on 80lb archival Strathmore drawing paper.
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The story in a drawing

Moleskine notebook.

I did this poem drawing in October 2012. At the time, I decided not to type out the words. Frankly, I'm tired of seeing my poetry elsewhere on the NET. Bits of it, a line here or there, a title, or the substance of what I've written reworked. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment that I am somewhat influential, but truly I find it insulting to discover my verbal images being used by other writers, or the style of my work being copied. So I've stopped posting poems and prose poems here in my blog. But I do like to keep an archive, and Google has an incredible search engine for blogs, meaning I can find a poem if I remember only a phrase. So I am encrypting my writing, and have no intention of passing on the password either. Sorry, just tired of being seen as 'raw material' for other writers and not being given credit where credit is due.

Of course, you can read the prose poem in the image. I'm just not making it easy to copy.

And I'll let you know what's going on with publishing - some good things in the works. And, no, I will never self-publish.

encrypted text

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Illuminata

Some photographs today of 'Illuminata,' an illustration for my prose poem of the same name with some lines from the poem written into the ink painting. I have used little bits of filters to elicit certain effects because rain white cloudy daylight can be very bland when it comes to gold leaf. :)

Illuminata, 2013, Brenda Clews, 28.5cm x 42cm, 11 1/4" x 16 1/2", graphite, India ink, copper, silver and gold leaf in a Moleskine A3 Sketchbook.

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The Lady and Her Skeleton

A little explosion of ink and pastel at 3am before an early day. Probably shouldn't have. (Before me is a small plastic skeleton, and so I am actually drawing a figure, that skeleton 'fleshed out,' dimly reminiscent of a Kokoschka style (maybe)).

While I was photographing the oil pastel and India ink sketch, I heard my 6lb kitten going for a box with dog treats, over and over, and then one fell to the ground and eventually I went into the kitchen to see. Sure enough, she had a 'dental-type' dog treat on the floor, in splinters, and was nibbling on some small bits. No wonder doggie isn't barking as much when I go out, and has, according to the Vet, put on weight. Lol. They are in cahoots, have become a team!!!



I just took a pic of the figure I drew/painted in the early hours of today (3am-ish) and her skeleton, who clearly is gonna morph into more enfleshed beings in drawings and paintings, I can feel it. Lol!

Hope it shows in this photo - she's inclined at the same angle as the skeleton who inspired her. Those are candles in front of his right leg, I should have moved them.

And I must arrange him differently from time to time; obviously, him standing there like that affects my vision. Last night it was time to give him a body. Listen to me! Due to the bad influence of my children, I now am hooked on vampire and zombie shows, and it's beginning to show isn't it? :)) ::laughing:: 



'The Lady and Her Skeleton,' 2012, 15" x 11", charcoal, Cretacolor water-soluble oil pastels, India ink on Pentalic archival 25% cotton 130lb paper. (A gorgeous pale cream paper, percentage of sale donated to the American Wildlife Foundation.)

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'Ink Ocean' performed live at HOWL@QSpace

Ink Ocean: http://youtu.be/w4Xs2dIt2m4

On Nov 25, 2012, I performed my prose poem 'Ink Ocean,' on the Gulf Oil Spill, as one of the featured poets at Nik Beat's HOWL@QSpace in Toronto. I had memorized the prose poem. The image of the ink drawing, from which the poem emerged, only appears in the still for the video (I've included an image at the end of this post for you). I'm actually quite happy with the performance itself - passionate, intense, and yet clear enunciation.

Ink Ocean is about the oil spill that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 when nearly 5 million barrels, or 210 million gallons, of crude oil were spilled into the sea due to an explosion of an off-shore drilling rig. It remains the largest marine spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

Over 5 months, hydro-carbon eating bacteria devoured 200,000 tons of oil and natural gas in the Gulf, and then stopped. Despite the massive cleaning efforts by the oil industry and governments, and the efforts of the bacteria, as of 2012, 40% of the spill remains in the waters.

This prose poem began as writing in an ink drawing. It took 6 - 8 months to finish, and was revised in preparation for this reading.  It is an experimental poem structually. A poem of utterance, of cross-currents and paradoxes. It is composed of many voices, and perspective shifts.

There are two parts. The first is on the oil spill, and the second is about love in a world bordering on oblivion, a world that's half spirit. We are in the 6th Mass Extinction on the earth. This is the backdrop.

The poem starts out in the Gulf and moves with the Gulf Stream to the Atlantic Ocean where it becomes a love poem. Can we love in a world inviting extinction? Yes, of course we can, and must.

---
With thanks to Nik Beat, Q Space and Luciano Iacobelli. It was a great evening.




Ink Ocean, 2010, 13" x 16", India ink on archival paper. My prose poem on the Gulf Oil Spill, Ink Ocean, emerged from this drawing. The poem was revised in 2012.

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'Charcoal Poems' painting-in-progress

Charcoal Poems, in-process, 2012, 5' x 5', willow charcoal, oils on double primed canvas.

These paintings are like writing. In the way that characters come to an author, I find myself getting to know the figures who have emerged and understanding what they are doing, what they are conveying, and how they are part of the visual imagination.

Written in the painting, The Charcoal Poems, which runs through the blue man who is floating, and by the ferris wheels, MAMA TOTO, and DISH in the STARS.

In the painting, to the right of the woman, some lines from Paul Celan's, 'In Prague':

The half death,
suckled plump on our life,
lay ash-image-true all around us -

we too
went on drinking, soul-crossed, two daggers,
sewn onto heavenstones, wornblood-born

My mother died in the middle of September this year, and I began this painting a few weeks later. There are references, I think. See the little woman the larger woman is attached by a red chord to? Like a mini-version, an inner child perhaps. I don't fully know what all the images are about, though, like remembering a dream, I am understanding them.

This painting is like working in a dream. Nothing at all like my usual process. I think it's almost finished, except for working on the white areas, which I'm thinking to paint with tinted pastel whites from the palette here.

Assaad Chehade, a masterful Surrealist painter who lives in France, wrote, in a comment of an earlier stage of this painting:

I don’t see - there - Marc Chagall or Frida Kahlo or Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I clearly see Brenda Clews with its artistic preoccupations (colors, Charcoal, canvas, and other elements) and its concern language, and even its musical relationships. A set (colors, words, music) can be influenced at a time - As they say the apostles of art.- but it has - already - exceeds any influence. Even if idolatry was introduced with writing, I don’t see any aspect of "icon" in your work. But I will go - without hesitation - to the narrative form. Which we call a sense, and not defend sense. Something that belongs to all visual cultures of the world.

Brenda, you are in the process of promoting the spirit of intellectual vision of the idea. You are currently working on a wonderful thing, it is not internal to the painted surface, but between the canvas and the viewer. Good continuations.

An update on Sunday, Nov 11th:

Worked on this all day yesterday, thought it was essentially finished. I was rather shocked this morning - the purple is not so bright under daylight bulbs at night. Not a great pic, but I don't have access to a better camera today. When it dries a bit, I'll apply a grey wash over the purple to tone it down somewhat - adding some Payne's Grey to the Dioxazine Purple wouldn't have worked, I don't think. A later wash will be better, but, with oils, you have to wait, and wait, and wait.....



(Although I have had the bright idea to put some fans in front of it and to leave them running all night - since I use water-soluble oil paints, which dry faster than traditional oils (at least for working, they still need 6  months to fully set), I may be able to finish this painting tomorrow. Fingers crossed. I'd like to start a new one - having discovered that my favourite size is 5' x 5, it will also be large.)
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Charcoal Poems continues...

Charcoal Poems, in-process, 2012, 5' x 5', willow charcoal, oils on double primed canvas.

And I was listening to Schönberg's 'Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 42,' Glen Gould piano, at high volume. My upstairs neighbour may have been banging on the floor, I'm not sure. After I sprayed the fixative on the charcoal, I opened the windows, and then didn't hear anything except outside sounds.

I promise to get a better camera. I can't believe how much my mother's recent death is affecting me.

Ok, so my 'influences' are Marc Chagall, Frida Kahlo, and Jean-Michel Basquiat (who I am truly into).
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Detail of 'Charcoal Poems' in-progress

Charcoal Poems, in-process-detail, Brenda Clews, 2012, 5' x 5', willow charcoal, oils on double primed canvas.

Sun shone into the living room, so the lighting was better than the photo I took last night. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get an evenly lit photo of the whole painting due to its angle, the size of my space, and so on. A part of me wants to leave it as part drawing, with lots of blank canvas, but we'll see what happens as I continue working on it.

Some notes as I responded to Facebook comments:

• These paintings are like writing. In the way that characters come to an author, I find myself getting to know the figures who have emerged and understanding what they are doing, what they are conveying, and how they are part of the visual imagination.

• The next painting will be stapled onto a stretcher - stapling to the back of an office divider doesn't work very well. Not only is the canvas a bit loose, but the divider tends to do what tall buildings do in high wind when I paint. It has a rhythm, literally. Also, it's too heavy to put on my studio easel, so I have to sit on the floor to work.

• While my mother's death is not an actual focus in this painting, yet painting is a way to work out one's feelings, which rise to the surface to be expressed and released... 

Last night, I added some orange, and then wavered off to sleep. My brother probably has already picked up my mother's ashes, and he trying to see if her niece in South Africa might be ok with spreading them there - my mother so loved her home country, and always missed it, and often said she would like to go back and die there. But we don't know if our idea is feasible, vis-a-vis shipping, or possible for her beloved niece. I think my mother's recent death came up in the Paul Celan quote I used. Paul Celan is a poet of death like no other.

In the painting, to the right of the woman (not visible in this detail), some lines from Paul Celan's, 'In Prague':

The half death,
suckled plump on our life,
lay ash-image-true all around us -

we too
went on drinking, soul-crossed, two daggers,
sewn onto heavenstones, wornblood-born

(With thanks to Pierre-Marie, Bent, Don, and Brandon [among many others] for comments which elicited these responses.)
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The Charcoal Paintings, in-process2

The madness continues. (See previous post for the fragment of a Paul Celan poem written on the left-hand side.)

A full shot from the greatest distance my living room allows; and a detail. Night-time, daylight bulbs. I'll likely keep working, maybe all night, why not, it's the weekend. :)

The Charcoal Paintings, in-process -a detail, 5' x 5', willow charcoal, oils, on double primed canvas.

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The Charcoal Paintings, in-process

When you don't know where to begin, begin where you are.

The Charcoal Paintings, in-process, 5' x 5', willow charcoal on double primed canvas. (Photo taken at night with two daylight bulbs in clamp lamps.)


Some lines from Paul Celan's, 'In Prague':

The half death,
suckled plump on our life,
lay ash-image-true all around us -

we too
went on drinking, soul-crossed, two daggers,
sewn onto heavenstones, wornblood-born

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As if Death Were a Passion

As if Death Were a Passion, Brenda Clews, 2012, 12" x 16", graphite and acrylic on triple-primed cotton canvas sheet.

outline the skeleton
in red
make the lines of the bones
red

alizarin crimson, cadmium red
flame red, poppy bright

ok, blood too

the passion of death

as if death
were a passion


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It's taken many weeks for me to watch this great little instructional video on how to draw a skeleton. I've never taken anatomy, so I fully appreciate teaching tools like this (thank you Kenny Mencher!). I'll have to get myself a wee skeleton at a Medical Supply store at some point. :)

I meant to take a photo before I started working it. Ah well. It's not perfectly drawn because I don't want that.

The instructional video is here: http://kenney-mencher.blogspot.ca/2011/11/video-drawing-skeleton-front-view.html?m=1 (if, like me, you'll probably watch it later do bookmark it since it's an unlisted video you won't be able to find it on YouTube without the link)

I took the photo with my iPhone 4 using Camera+ and then a Clarity filter - later I'll blog it without the filter. It's just kind of neat with the tones the filter gives it.

Figurative Art: 'Every Angel is terror' (Rilke) and 'Braille'

"Every Angel is terror. And yet, ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul" from Rilke, 2nd Duino Elegy, 2012, 18" x 24", charcoal, acrylic, primed canvas sheet.

When I go to drop-in life painting sessions, which consist of 4 hour poses, difficult for the model for sure, but rather static to paint, I like to make the painting into something which can evoke a poetry in the viewer. In this painting, to which I gave a few lines from Rilke's 2nd Duino Elegy as a title, the woman has what I call Etherics beside her. In my imagination, they are preparing her for an inner visionary journey. They are tribal soul sisters caring for her. Whether this be dream, or waking imagination, or the mysterious process of art, I don't know. You will see them as you do and they will make sense in the context of your inner life.

Charcoal sketch of the same model as in the previous painting, done after the painting from a slightly different angle, on primed canvas.

Replacing an earlier version of this poem painting with the charcoal sketch inverted (see earlier version below.)

The poem, 'Braille,' was written in 2006, and the drawing was from a drop-in life drawing session that year at the Vita Brevis Studio.

The painting came first (and soon I'll add some writing from an older journal that seems to express the figures in the painting). Then, while the painting was drying, while I was still in the studio at TSA, I did a small charcoal sketch on a sheet of the canvas pad from a slightly different angle to that of the painting. Then I paired the charcoal sketch inverted so it's like a negative with a poem that is in my poetry mms to replace an older version with another model from a life drawing session, which I added to this post as well.

'Every Angel is terror' (Rilke): painting in-progress

I was photographing this in a patch of sunlight, my backside in the alley, and a man drove by in a large red SUV, and the man with the puppy that is part husky called Maggie was trying to get her on leash so she wouldn't run on my still-wet painting, and then the man in the large red SUV started backing up, and Maggie's owner and I, well, what's going on? He stuck his head out the window. 'Do you paint?' 'Yeah.' 'Is that yours?' 'Yeah.' 'Do you sell your work?' 'Yeah.' 'Do you have a studio?' 'No, just my apartment.' 'Can I come by to see your work? I like paintings.' 'Sure.' 'Is that one for sale? I like it.' 'Yes.' So I gave him my phone number. He's the general contrator for a store going in around the corner.

A cute story, that I share. My apartment is getting so filled with paintings and drawings from all these lifedrawing sessions I've been going to I am considering selling with a PWYCA - 'pay what you think it is worth, and what you can afford.' Although a painting this size might go for around a grand, I'm not affiliated with any galleries and don't even have a 'store' at my art website. Rather than have all these paintings collecting dust in folios, I might shift my sensibility to another way of offering my work to those who really love it.

"Every Angel is terror. And yet,
ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul" from Rilke, 2nd Duino Elegy, 2012, 18" x 24", in-progress, charcoal, acrylic, triple-primed cotton canvas sheet.

'Every Angel is terror' (Rilke) painting-in-process

"Every Angel is terror. And yet,
ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul" from Rilke, 2nd Duino Elegy, 2012, 18" x 24", painting-in-progress, charcoal, acrylic, canvas sheet.

TSA tonight. I'll work on it over the next few days. A rough draft, you could say.

Dancer

Happy with this painting of a dancer in my Moleskine. Why? She is lithe and muscular, and has an elegance. She also looks like she's dancing in an ink painting. Splotches of black India ink move over her; she is situated in torrents of acrylic flame red ink. In her dance, she holds still for a moment and her pose imparts a tension of the energy of emotion. There is life, passion and death here.

What I most enjoyed was overdoing this piece. Many inks were dip penned and brush spread until it was a mess, and then, miraculously, I washed the inks off, using all my rags and a half roll of paper towels, wetting and blotting until the sketch began to re-emerge.

With that weight of paint removed from her, of which only I hold the memory, she is again lithe, ready to spring.

And I had to laugh when someone said she looked intersex, and admit ever since Fellini's Satyricon, and then Jung's exploration of the hermaphrodite, I've felt intersex in dreams or art can be a powerful image of inner union. If my Dancer appears to be both woman and man, I am delighted.

Not sure why, since I don't usually anymore, I scanned the sketch, and then the first wash of black India ink and permanent red acrylic ink, and I took an iPhone photo early in the process of adding the inks that I later removed. I have included these three in-process photos, along with the final one (it's first, on the left), for you so you can see the progression of this little painting that took the greater part of last Sunday to complete.

Dancer, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, graphite, India and acrylic inks, Moleskine folio Sketchbook A4.