Self Portrait #10 - Dancing Selves, Version 2

I'm trying to remember how long it takes for me to 'come round' to a painting - they're always such a shock when they're first done. Even things we create we have to get used to as they grow on us.

I'll fiddle with it for a few hours, then go to the library to pick up some books that have come in, and perhaps buy another canvas. Usually I trace the drawing, just in case I'm not happy with the painting, and I didn't this time because the large roll of parchment paper is in the back of the closet under the stairs, behind the small kitchen cupboard with the hot plate on it, and behind the iMac box, and it's a determined effort to get anything out of there. The canvas board seems to work, it's fairly dry this morning, and no buckling, but if I try again that means re-drawing the image, oh groan.

The colours are darker than they are in real life. I had hoped the way Flikr and Blogger lighten everything would compensate for it; but, no, and I didn't see this until it was uploaded. Flikr's free accounts have a 20MG limit each month, and I'm already at 28% of that. There'll be more posts of this painting later too.

When I look at it, I see wailing almost - that there's some storm or tempest. Or is that just my tired eyes? I was up till 3am and then woken at 9am by the thunderous noise of young children running and shouting just above my head. It's a good thing I love children, eh!

Self Portrait #10 - Dancing Selves

I would say this is my least successful so far. It's still wet, and this is only the first layer of paint. But I wanted it to be done, and of course it isn't. We'll see how I can "fix it up" tomorrow.

Almost there... Updated below, a sketch now...

One more day and then Sparky's Self-Portrait Marathon is over, and what a month it's been! As I'd been planning, I took some photos of "dancing." But seem unable, so far, to use them as inspiration for a painting. I stare at the blank canvas, this time larger, 22" x 28", draw some lines, erase. I know that the paint won't be dry enough by tomorrow to 'finish' anything that might happen today, and so then I consider entering the last set of 'dancing photos' and letting it go at that.

Only one of the reasons I started blogging was to deal with an incessant writer's block, and painter's block. It's been the most terrific remedy, too.

So paint I must.

It made me laugh, but someone said that my 'self portrait' photographs were way better than my paintings!

Now, don't ya know, the lawd made cameras to free up artists from havin' to represent the world representationally. Oh, they can do it if they want, but they don't have to no more!

But it's having an effect, all this honesty. People still prefer what "looks like" to an interpretation that becomes another kind of "looking like..." And how I've wished I could prop up a mirror where my workplace is and do one from life, but money went into paint, the latter seeming more of a priority.

In the midst of all this, naturally crisis arises, and the moving company threatens to auction or throw out my household goods because they discovered they can get three times what I'm paying for the space my items take up. So a new apartment search is on, reading classified ads till I can't see straight between paint brush strokes and blog reading. Just now PS-Storage has called to let me know the size storage I need is available and if a suitable apartment in this area doesn't emerge over the weekend, my brothers and son and I hopefully will be moving our stuff downtown. The storage is within walking distance; it'll be good to have access to my household again. All the books will have to come into this tiny basement apartment, though...

I look at the blank canvas, sigh, pick up a pencil... we'll see what, if anything, emerges.

Sometimes, it's just DIVE.

__________

Later, well, it is white canvas board, and I took the photo in direct sun, but the whites don't want to show.

Don't know how much of a self-portrait it'll be, in the traditional sense, but at least there's something to guide the paint now...

After meditating, and walking Keesha (my dog), more diving... see you later!

Celebrating the dancer, sort of...

These are not as well done as they could have been. I got into my favourite dance duds, ran upstairs when the house was quiet, set up a tripod, dashed and posed on the timer a few times, grabbed the tripod, and headed back downstairs to my underground abode. I could have asked, I guess, when my landlord was going to be out, but then I'd have to admit I was 'taking photos for a self portrait marathon' - and who wants to admit a thing like that? Okay, so they're blurry. Sorry. And the bookcase smack behind me, well, some clone stamping, and viola! Gone for all intents and purposes! Okay, so I had to blur the background over the vanished books with an impressionist brush, put a spotlight or so on each figure to make them visible... shucks, I'm only tryin'! I am posting these with the affirmation that I will make my final self portrait out of them by Saturday. In storage I have a large 8' x 5' mirror that I practice poetry/dance performance pieces before, dang if I can manifest one of those mirrors before the ending of the marathon - hence the camera. And I will write a prose poem too... (please tell me I'm silly, because really I am :).

Self Portrait #9

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon. Take a look at the slideshow of all the entries in the marathon, fabulous! This excessive gaze at the self is over at the end of the week. Doing these self portraits is excruciating.



The face is wider and rounder than mine- but I'm not aiming for a "photograph." I had difficulty uploading a photo with an accurate rendition of the colours and white in all the right places. I eventually photographed it in direct sun, the light of which is glancing off the paint.

7.75" x 10.25", oil on perhaps paper, perhaps canvas, I don't know, I bought a few rolls of it at Active Surplus awhile back.

Workspace

You can see the little card table, and the board on which the last self portrait is taped. Above it is our "dinner table," and about 3 feet away, where the camera is, is my futon couch/bed. The computer is inbetween, as well as an older Ikea leather chair. It's called cram-it-in in the most minimalist way possible. I know it's hard to imagine, but cozy is the word for it. Two can fit in here if we stay seated; three, and it's over-crowded... :)

Paper Wings

This poem's joined The Festival of the Trees 1 --- swing over, hyperlink-like, and read Dave's great inaugural celebration on all the terrific posts submitted. Every month there'll be a blog post by one of the rotating editors :) devoted to collecting all the posts submitted that month on trees. Tree worship is alive and well and thriving!
Paper Wings


I open 500 envelopes a day: transactions, records, letters. Slice them open like pockets, remove sheaths of paper.

Paper cuts, edges like swords.

The first paper was stone. Scrawling on cave walls, then wet clay tablets, wax-coated inscribed by metal, bone, ivory stylus. Papyrus, sheepskin, parchment.

Unfold letters, staple, sort, deliver it to the offices.

Papering the world. It burns. Flames of culture singe.

From pictures to pictographs to abstract figures to alphabets, our grammars of sound ground into ink of soot, glue and water scratched with reeds, or quills, taking the five outer wing feathers of geese, swans, crows, owls, turkeys, hawks.

As body is to breath,
paper and ink are to mind.

Without papyrus, animal skin, parchment, vellum or the plant fibre, cellulose mulch of pressed paper... our history.

The body of language is inked paper.

The Gutenberg Printing Press, replaceable wooden letters. 1436. Cursive handwriting, 1495, Manutius of Venice, the 'running hand.'

Our 26 alphabet letters not till the end of the 16th century.

Mass printing. Mass distribution. Wide scale literacy.

The first paper was stone. You drew on the cave walls.

The world is papered with knowledge. Burn all the paper in the stoneage firepit of our souls.

Smooth burning words under my fingers.

Forests are the lungs of the planet; and wood dust and water promise of immortality.

Give us our words, records, songs, drawings, photographs, to store. Save diagrams of what houses us. Even Capitalism depends on the paper that money is printed on. Bank statements, loans, stock certificates. Cheques, vouchers, tickets. Medical, dental records. Taxes. All the transactions.

Delible records kept in the vaults of time. Mementos.

Ownership tattooed in the ink on the paper that becomes passport of proof.

Birth and baptism and education and marriage and employment and travel and retirement and death certificates.

The paper trail of our lives.

Envelopes as wallpaper. Bodily fluids, tissue papers. Cards, wrapping, origami. Computer paper. Specially treated, bonded. Newspapers, boxes.

The world is awash with paper.
Inscribed paper.

Mind. Hand. Ink. Paper.
My letter opener flashes like a slicing knife.

Envelope after envelope, stack after stack of paper. Filing ourselves. Pixelated language printed out reams upon reams collected, stored.

I wander the stacks of the library afterwards, shelf upon shelf, floor upon floor of bound books of yellowed paper inscribed with words, figures, numbers, images.

This gift of trees,
memory of ourselves.

This love letter
of paper.

________
ah, sigh, I've been tinkering with this for months, it just keeps growing...

Self Portrait #8, plus photos

This week I tutored a sweet Japanese Physics student through stages of a philosophy paper, it was hard work for both of us -me eliciting coherent ideas and grammar, he pushing himself to produce, and then felt bad because I spent the money on paints and cheap brushes (when I have tubes of paint and sable brushes in storage). But a friend at another site loves #7 and has asked about it, so I should feel better...

Also I found a card table with a wobbly leg that I fixed in about 2 seconds and it's now a 'painting table' - so I don't have to put the dishes on the floor while I use the tiny bathroom counter - although it takes up nearly all the room in my tiny space. It's so damp down here too, that I wonder how these paintings will dry. Oh, fret, fret.

Ok, a garden goddess, based on a photo my daughter took (my choice of location & pose, I couldn't resist those roses), and I look way younger, but whadya wanna make of it? ::grins:: Paint & brush seem to be doing their own thing. Perhaps I'm celebrating a younger self, who knows. I guess I'll have to get a really fine brush to darken the face more & put a teeny tiny dot of colour in the eyes...

It strikes me that the 'open heart' of Self Portrait #7 has here turned into a canopy of open, blossoming magenta roses...

Oil on canvas, 9.25" x 7.75".

Update: Here's a merge of some photos over the last three years... no, one can't be blonde forever:) Click for larger size.



For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Morning Pages...

What engulfs emits light.
_________________
I had put this commentary in a comment below, something I might try from time to time when I don't want to overload the image for you...

I read this article, Lighter Side of Black Holes, and later the image I've posted emerged. As I pondered my syllogism, what engulfs emits light, I wondered how it would translate across time shifts and conscious ripples. The statement spawned in my consciousness from reading about a 'scientific discovery,' that is presumably based in the empirical world, in the 'real' world of verifiable happenings, could be applied to other areas of human experience.

Emotionally what does it mean: what engulfs emits light.

And in terms of a kind of dominant gene, combative, Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest, Tennyson Nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, all the devouring that goes on, is there always a record of the engulfment? That light is emitted?

The conclusions my night-time/morning mind came to, what engulfs emits light, have pulled me into strange and wondrous musings on the philosophical ramifications...

"Scientists have cracked a huge cosmic paradox — how black holes can be the darkest objects known but also responsible for a quarter of all light and other radiation produced in the universe since the Big Bang."

Like, wow.

Morning Pages...

Once it appeared in the world, there was a difference.

Things weren't the same afterwards.

What was puzzling was that no-one noticed when it happened. Life went on.

But everything had changed utterly.

Morning Pages: On a Summer's Morning

(I am attempting morning pages, even if it's only a few lines.)

On A Summer's Morning

Something a little more pure. Where the gift is.

The hot humid air bathes me.

I use espresso coffee in my coffee maker; flavourful, earthy.

Free the moment of its burdens.

Find home.
_____

After which I meditated for many hours on what home is, and this continued day after day. It's become a mantra whose sound I follow. Even today watching the leaves catch the morning's rain, remembering filling the hugest flower pot I could find with as many red geraniums as it could fit for the doorstep of my old house and wondering where again I shall be watering such richly red blossoms. I think of Jean, Mary, Tamar, who are all in perhaps similar though different processes on the meaning of home...

And then the Linden tree down the street, filling the road with such gold. I picked up a handful of marigold-yellow seed fluff and placed it in a small pewter-glazed ceramic bowl. The beginning of an alter, it feels like.

But that's another story.

Self Portrait #7

Paint's still wet (oil on canvas)...

I haven't painted in a very long time, but yesterday bought a small set of oils and one brush, and tonight cleared the foot & a half space on the bathroom counter where we have our dish rack and painted one of the self portraits. There was no black or even brown paint, hence the blue hair. Is the red paint her heart? I give the paint a fair bit of freedom to do what it wants and become witness to the results. What emerged frightened and exhilirated me. A meditation in 'emergent self'? - my dream of a few nights ago said, use brushes, not sticks, which I took to mean paints not watercolour pencils. Interesting. Not quite starlight, but tiny pin pricks of an opening of something...

Mary Ann says, "The red part in the middle looks like your heart is open for all to see."

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Self Portrait of Woman Keeps on Walkin'...

Update: Sparky's asked me to decide how to post this mini series. Gnash, gnash. Ok, decision. All together, but he only has to post one. There are 10 so far, and I'm planning to paint at least one of them too.

They're all clickable for readability.
___________
Da Original



________________

Da drawing:



________________
De first batch of Self Portrait of Woman Gone Walkin':







________________

Da Second Batch:










_________________

Yat is enough. She gonna stay home now! (Or leave town!) NO MORE WALKIN', Self Portrait!

(Sometimes ya git caught in a swirling eddy [of walkin' S-Ps] [oh, 'n there's no overlayin'; they's all real shots in real places, even if enhanced later] & ya can't hardly git out!)

From my notebook...

(the first two, the twigs, & vertical lines, from dreams the night before)

Don't use twigs, use brushes.

The downward vertical line & the upward vertical line don't meet, and she saw this years ago and went away distraught.

It's SunFire Day. Solstice.

The typoGenerator* threw up some of my images. A photograph of a red tulip; a line drawing of a pensive woman.

In the field of green, some random red.

My dog lies sleeping beside me; she always has to be near.

The wall clock ticks. The world holds still. O

Meditate.

(I did for an hour.)

Then move, fast.

(I didn't. But ran into an old friend in her blue Rav4 later, the same car she drove me out to a farm in the country 5 years ago to meet and fall in love with a certain puppy, an occurrence which seemed stretched like a line inevitably from this point.)

_____
*thanks to Dave for the link

The plain face...

Surely post & then take this down... the photo underlaying the drawing (which will surely do more walking), unadorned, plain, as is, the background fuzzed, oh yeah, well...

Re-visers, oh, oh..... A Wandering Self Portrait!

I apologize for updating posts; it drives me crazy too. Yesterday was a case in point (surely dozens of times, those with aggregators must have... oh, sorry!). But the post kept growing! I eventually took the drawing and photographed it in different places - no overlays, the real drawing in real places: leaves, a gutter, a posting pole. Now I'm thinkin' where else I could take her. Any suggestions?

Self Portrait of Woman Wandering the City.

No comments allowed on this post; you'll have to go back to the other one...

Self Portrait #6 - Using the Non-Suffering Method of Drawing THE SELF PORTRAIT GOES WALKING!

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

The Non-Suffering Method of Drawing a Self-Portrait: take a photo, some good contrasts work best; lighten it & print (no need to use copious amounts of toner); paper clip it to the sheet you want to draw on; hold up on a window with bright sunlight behind and trace...


This is a traced drawing of the new profile pic. Looks way too young, but that's beside the point. Why? It's hard to draw ourselves - afterall, we haven't spent a lifetime looking at our faces. I have no real idea of my eye or nose or mouth shape, nor the way the curls fall. So I'm learning... for all you folks who don't draw, this is a viable way to learn! Even if it doesn't exactly turn out to 'look' like us.





A hand drawn image of a photograph photographed. O, this is fun! Lady of the Vines, or the Forest, or Fence Sitter.






In the gutter!

WORK AT HOME on this woman!

YES, she's been sighted all over the city!

Self Portrait goes walking!

Intrepid artist wearing a sun visor and sunglasses and a skimpy red dress seen taping suspicious SELF PORTRAIT to public poles and drains!

Blogsday for Bloomsday

It's an enjoyable, funny, sad, irreverent, serious hour of blog readings trolled from the NET on June 6th (I'm, umm, before the middle, it was interesting to hear an actor read ma words, too). Sit back, enjoy, while you compose another self portrait for Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon. Open Source Boston Radio:

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)

Self Portrait #5, Chorus in Red

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Update: Surely our self-portraits are versions of ourselves, and it looks like I've done versions on an image. Wonder how that happened? So far this is my favourite self-portrait. It took the longest; is more complex than it looks with something like 87 layers in photoshop. There were the photographs, one of which I chose, printed in black and white and inked in the outline and coloured the dress with a red and wet watercolour pencil; I traced this version in ink on tissue paper, and painted that dress with the same red and wet watercolour pencil and stuck it to the printed one. My daughter likes these 'two Brenda's' best, kind of a collage. Then I photographed the collage and layered it with the original photo plus another one. I crudely cut out dolphins and used them as patterns, decreasing the size on some (that's where all the layering is); then I wrote a couple of words from the post in; drew some right angle red lines and enhanced the red in various layers and posted it. It probably does "look" like me - in that if you saw this collage & you knew the Summertime me you'd recognize me. If you know what I mean! But then, hey, it's a photo, and a take-off on a photo, and a take-off on a take-off of a photo...

I kind of look like a chorus in red, don't I? :grins:

Yesterday's post: On the steaming city day, a high and dusty South wind, I walk miles breaking in new shoes that break in my feet. Red spots that threaten blisters that never arrive. Returning other shoes for exchange, I walk in a ridiculously skimpy red sundress and put the brim of my hat low because I don't care and don't want to see anyone's disapproval. Aging women shouldn't have to hide themselves, and so I don't. It's too hot to wear anything else. Finally on the way back, walking very slowly, I stop at Future Bakery for a coffee. The patio is large, partially covered with a Corono Beer tarp and a couple of tables have Corona umbrellas. Wherever my skin touches anything it sweats. The backs of my legs, behind my knees, the soles of my feet. Somewhere birds impossibly chirp. The sounds of the voices of the people around me chirp. It's a good spot, where students and writers come to drink, to study, to write. It hasn't changed in 20 years. Near me is Ye Olde Brunswick House; across the street my favourite Indian restaurant, Nataraj; an ice cream booth; and on the other corner, By The Way Cafe, which hasn't been a vegetarian cafe in at least two decades but whose sign still says it is. And now I must make my way on to buy fruits and vegetables and then home. Where I will ask my daughter to photograph me for another self portrait...

Of multiples. Duchampian. It was actually fun tonight, playing, thank you Jean!

Self Portrait #4, a photograph of a reflection...

Does a photograph of a reflection of oneself in the glass covering a watercolour drawing by oneself count as a self portrait? Tired, having walked many miles in search of shoes for my daughter, for myself, in 32C/90F humidity, now listening to Anjani's and Cohen's Blue Alert and sipping red wine...

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Self Portrait #3

Who am I? Why do I find self-portraiture harrowing? What my mind sees and what my hand draws are not the same. Is it that my eyes are trained to see like a camera, and my hand feels its way over surfaces, uncaring about representational likeness? If someone who knows me saw these self portraits would they recognize me? The problem is no, they wouldn't; not out of context. I don't know who I'm drawing, but it's not me. Could I then call them versions of the self?


Because Natalie asked, for Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Two renditions of the same self portrait drawn in a tiny mirror, on a small piece of canvas, 3.5"x5", india ink, watercolour pencil. Click on image for larger sizes.

Blogsday

I found this in my inbox, neat huh:

"Hello,

I'm writing from Open Source, a public radio show based in Boston and distributed around the country.

Last year we started what we hope will be a yearly tradition for us called Blogsday. Based loosely on Bloomsday, which celebrates "Ulysses" as an evocation of the whole world in a single day (in Joyce's case, June 16, 1904), the idea is create a mosaic portrait of our country from excerpts of blog posts written on the same day. (In our case this past Tuesday, June 9th.)

After assembling the excerpts we bring in two accomplished and agile actors to read them. I'm writing now because your post on June 6, "On Saturday Night," caught our eye and we're interested in using it on the show, which will air live on Thursday night from 7-8pm EST.

We can't pay anything -- this is public radio after all -- but we can guarantee a respectful treatment, a national radio audience, and a link on our blog.

Best regards, Chelsea"

I don't know if it's podcast. Chelsea did email me at 7:30pm: "It's being read right now. It sounds great. Many thanks." It was a long day and, oh, it was nice to say yes to Blogsday in honour of Bloomsday...

Self Portrait #2

Another sketch, for Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon, surreptitiously where I'm working. The small mirror was under the counter, it was dimly lit, and I had my sketch book flat in front of me, so... Someone did say, "That looks like you!" But then my daughter said it was cartoony and didn't. Representation. Oh, sigh. Self-portraits. Oh, sigh.

While I released myself from having to make people look like themselves some time ago, and consider my drawings instead 'inspired' by my models, and it was very freeing, I am trying to create more of a likeness, however that may be!

Eyes are too big. Reading glasses askew - that's me!

Random Bits from the Notebook...

Don't use twigs, use brushes.

The downward vertical line & the upward vertical line don't meet, and she saw this years ago and went away distraught.

It's SunFire Day. Solstice.

The typoGenerator threw up some of my images. A photograph of a poppy; a line drawing of a woman.

In the field of green, some random red.

My dog lies sleeping beside me; she always has to be near.

The wall clock ticks. The world holds still. O

Meditate.

(I did for an hour.)

Then move, fast.

(I didn't. But ran into an old friend in her blue Rav4 later, an occurence which seemed stretched like a line inevitably from this point.)

Self Portrait #1

It's a self-portrait, because Natalie asked, for Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

I know it's pale and limpid. So many night-time dreams over the years that I ought to draw, paint... but I don't know.

Daily Sustenance...

Perhaps I'll write about meditation, what I do daily, sometime...

100 Days, a place to meditate, is a wonderful site if you'd like to find compatriots.

Dress Us In Apple Blossoms

A short prose poem published in Qarrtsiluni that I wrote on Earth Day, Dress Us In Apple Blossoms. I took the photo of the apple where I was working just before eating it. When I looked at it later that night, I found the image disturbing - you'll see what I mean. And got to thinking about apples and Eve and wombs and death and Genesis and nature. We're revising the texts now, planting new seeds...

On Saturday Night

Do you ever get those evenings that never quite fall into an activity, or a rhythm?

The hours drift by, unfulfilled. The rain falls in rich curtains of fertility. Everything is bathing, the trees, shrubs, flowers, birds, earthworms. But your mind strays, unfocussed.

I wouldn't call it boredom, but it sort of is.

When nothing you can think of is enough to rouse you from your couch of comfort. The hours aren't weaving or unweaving anything. You're just wasting them.

You feel spent, uninspired, worked over, at odds, suspended.

I don't feel like drawing
or walking the dog.

I don't feel like being alive
or dead.

Or creating art out of my life.

I don't feel like being alone,
or with anyone.

The lush Spring rain
simply falls
without metaphor.

You want to eat something
to nourish and fulfill
but all the multi-grain breads and cereals, the fruits, oranges, apples, strawberries, grapes, and almonds and raisons and cheeses, the fresh vegetables, carrots, green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, and herbal tea of cranberries and vanilla that sits steaming in your hand
doesn't satisfy.

And you ask questions of the moist fresh air all evening
about what was, is, or will be
asking about intention
knowing that's it,
the intent to be
is everything.

And you write it,
this mundane
enfolded mystery.

Sex and the Artist

This is a rather funny, depending on how you look at it. A dear blogging friend, Bill, bought one of my watercolor pencil drawings:

Dance, the Dream, Disappearing Into Each Other, 8.5" x11", watercolour pencil on paper, 2006.

The writing 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.'

(click on it for larger sizes)

He wrote in a recent comment, "By the way, my Mother in law thinks my awful painting of those people having sex should be removed from our quest bedroom. I love it by the way and will post it framed soon."

Huh? I overlaid (uh oh, I'm noting my terminology) 3 sketches of the same model from the same lifedrawing class and then colored them so that they seem what I thought was melting into each other (uh oh, terminology again) like a dream, sort of surrealist. All I can see is the figure 8 of the composition, which I like and didn't notice until it was finished. But now that he mentions it...

A prime example of how the artist creates a work but doesn't thereby generate the meaning... (Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, but don't ask me for a page reference, it's in storage! Booth says there is a gap between author and text, and between text and audience. I'll say!)

But perhaps unconsciously... (O, roll over Freud, roll over).

Bedroom in Seaton Village

The futon bed couch arrived, was constructed, laid with a sleeping bag and pillows...

Upon which I immediately sat and meditated and then napped. Not quite the Bedroom in Arles, but nice...

And even nicer to be off the sweating floor (a swamp, shhh). Austerities of sleeping on a foam mattress (nee sponge) on the floor gone. It feels positively luxurious. Emergency measures were called for. Beautiful Kobe design cover in flame colours ready in 2 weeks, and I’ll post it then.

Update: Perhaps I should dress it in velvets, as this filter suggests...