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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Early Poem Painting like a Frank Stella

Continuing with my remembrance of my years doing a degree in Fine Arts in the 1970s, and finding myself in the middle of a Conceptual Art era in which I did not belong, I suddenly made the connection with an old painting of mine and Frank Stella's famous stripes. 

Now I like Frank Stella as a person, - what I have heard of him in interviews (a recent Frank Stella interview with Eleanor Wachtel is brilliant), and his views as espoused in articles I've read over the years. His stripes paintings (what I knew as an art student), however, leave me on the cold side. They are certainly outstanding for their time. It's self-confident work, sure of itself. All the stripes are hand-painted (pencil lines but no tape) too. But do these works of Stella's inspire me, inspire the poetry in me? No, rather, these paintings remind me of good geometry, bordering on an Op Art. Fun, a little play with the way the eye reads its optical images.

I understand that for Stella, abstract art is a type of landscape, this is its European roots, and that his aim was to create art that removed realism, all traces of Renaissance perspective, the way art up to the modern era normally represents the world, and so on. He was enormously successful in his endeavours - at 35 he was the youngest man ever to have a solo retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. His current work, which moves into sculptural paintings, is composed of a complexity of constructions, and is bright and busy as it approaches the rhythms of music, still doesn't make me want to rush to the easel.

Yet, yet. By my fourth year with my very avante guarde art teacher (who did huge 'shit-brown canvases' out of house paint, or made rooms of white sheets), I was very clearly doing 'a Frank Stella.' Why it has taken me this long to realize it, I have no idea.

I don't have a photo of my 'art school' painting - and the colour in these old snapshots does not convey the vibrance of the pure acrylic paint. I never personally liked this painting, though I got a top grade for it, and other people seemed to like it - and have no idea what the poem that I wrote for it was. Also, other than finding it mysteriously resting on the back of a couch in a photo with my Dad in his condo years later, I have no idea what happened to it.

I include some Frank Stellas so you can see what I mean. Mine, of course, a poor derivative, though this was never conscious till now (though I had studied Stella in university, of course I had).

The man in the first two photos with the roundish face and black moustache is my first husband, an Irishman from Dublin - a short early marriage that lasted 2 years. I'm in the 2nd photo (with straightened hair, oh the craziness of youth), you'll figure out which one. My Dad in the last. And then some paintings that are part of the masterpieces of Abstract Expressionism by Frank Stella.

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Another Photo of My Mother

Still not ready to write of this past week, her death, her cremation, the ways in which it was a blessing and the ways in which it was a trauma. But I've been thinking of this photo, and, piling through dusty photo albums on bookshelves and then in the basement, finally found it. Taken on Adderley Street in Cape Town. I was 23 months old.

 

Bread for the Birds

I fed the birds out back this morning for my mother. With a half bread-bag of collected bread, it seemed a simple enough offering to one of the good memories. Keesha, my dog, was on a leash, and while she wanted to eat all the crusts, easily accepted being pulled away from the pile. Our kitten always accompanies us on the dog stops by riding on my shoulder, held gently but firmly under my hand, but she was only looking for whatever moves, people, squirrels, birds, falling leaves. Later I watched from the window as the pigeons came, feasted.

My mother died last Thursday, September 13th; the funeral is tomorrow, though it hardly that, she was 89, and outlived all of her siblings and friends, so we will only have an immediate family gathering around her casket before it goes into the crematory fires. I seem to have been in deep meditation since she passed away. It was a good death, coming as a release after years of gradual decline and being fully bedridden after her stroke 6 months ago. She passed away peacefully.


Florence Clews, 1923-2012
Christmas, 2011
Photo by Tara Clews

(Sept 18th. I am still too raw to write. Her funeral was this morning. 

Many blessings, Mom. Love you. xoxo)
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