I sold a painting!! Gone to a good home! I'm so happy!

’Every Angel is terror' (Rilke), 2011, 18” x 22” x 1", charcoal, acrylic and oil on canvas in a drop mount birch frame.

"Every Angel is terror. And yet, ah,
knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly
birds of the soul" from Rilke, 2nd Duino Elegy
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Ink Ocean: A Video of a Live Performance with Images and Videos from the Gulf Oil Spill Added.

It's my birthday, and I won't tell you how old I am, but I did get this video finished finally. The last step was subtitling it, and got that done by 11pm. I worked long and hard on this video of a performance I did at Urban Gallery on January 30th, and hope you take away something of the sadness and outrage over the Gulf Oil Spill and what we are doing to our world even as we have to continue loving in an increasingly polluted world...


direct link: Ink Ocean

Brenda Clews performs her poem, Ink Ocean, live at Urban Gallery in Toronto during a Performance Poetry Salon she organized there during her Poempaintings show in 2014. http://brendaclews.com; http://urbangallery.ca

John Oughton plays his electric guitar with his magic box of sounds: http://library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/oughton/index.htm

All the extra clips (except for the drawing, see below) are from public domain video and photographs of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill in 2010.

'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 (included in the video, the actual drawing is pictured in the credits). It took 6 - 8 months to finish, and was revised in preparation for a reading in 2012. It is an experimental poem structurally. A poem of utterance, of cross-currents and paradoxes. It is composed of different voices, and perspective shifts. The crude oil spilling in the ocean forms words. The poem arose out of a drawing in black ink, an ink that became a central shifting, drifting, writing, spilling, seeping metaphor in the poem on the oil spill.

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Our Beach

For those fun sun lovers who go south each winter, some photos: our beach; our beach with what-appears-to-be a swarm of fireflies; and a selfie in a beach cover-up that keeps all the uv rays off - if I appear a little bright-eyed it's because I took the Ray-Bans off and am blinking in the flood of sunlight. The dog also has a special beach cover-up in the first photo that protects her against harmful uv rays. You can't be too careful on the beach!



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Painter, Poet, Beggar, Thief - a poetry salon @ Urban Gallery, last day of my show there!

Tomorrow is the LAST DAY of my show at Urban Gallery and we are ending it with a kick-ass Poetry Salon, Poet Painter Beggar Thief, featuring five poet painters: Luciano Iacobelli, Nik Beat, Norman Bethune, Jennifer Hosein and moi. Jennifer is kindly hosting the salon. Her poster is uber cool.

I'll be reading from my Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems, and the first poem is about the scent of magnolias (flower sacred to Venus) on my tongue...



I wonder if this test recording will work? Sorry, if I remove the post because it doesn't.

Ok, it's the craziest little thing, but I'll leave it. I was testing out something for, ahem, future 'real' recordings. Lol!

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Another still from my edited video of the performance of Ink Ocean at Urban Gallery...

Rising to the surface for a bit. Hi everyone! How're y'all doing?

I'm still working on the video. There are very minor things that no-one else will notice and I may just leave - there wasn't enough light in the gallery and so when I boosted the light in the editing process I also gained grain and a loss of clarity - after adding a filter to remove some of the noise, it has taken about 3 days to render the video! Enough is enough. Any other changes will have to be done to a master file. Also, I think the sound needs to be entirely re-done. But is that because I am not just immersed in the editing of this performance piece but drowning in it? Lol. I hope it's ready before the last day of my show at Urban Gallery on Saturday!
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