A Calligraphy of Light in the Room

A Calligraphy of Light in the Room, May 2009

Recent photography (like, hmnn, yesterday, yes, I'm sure it was yesterday, when the light, the light... or the day before...).

In the room.
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click on it

Abrasion #2: by Joaquim Gil & Nuno Tavares

Abrasion #2, Created, Interpreted, Edited, Sound & Music by Joaquim Gil & Nuno Tavares, and I love their YouTube channel name: "Science Friction," (ScienceFrictionProds).


Abrasion #2 is brilliant! It's the BEST Butoh-inspired piece I have ever seen! While I may wish Gil & Tavares had uploaded it in HD for greater clarity, I am simply glad they have created a channel at YouTube and are sharing their work.

I sit here, in stunned amazement. There are videos, and videos. And suddenly, out of nowhere: art.

The images reverberate within me. I am deeply moved. The feel of the film, its archaic sepia abandoned warehouse setting, the drama between two men who live in near-naked isolation in an edifice that's becoming earth, a floor of stamped soil, the transition clips of lights and other strange phenomenon, like you see behind your closed eyelids when you're trying to sleep in a lit room, is an aesthetic I find gorgeously tactile, mythic.

Art that is magnificent, like a Tarkovsky, that great Russian filmmaker's palette and epic style, or Fellini's Satyricon, the abandoned building, the doubles, one white, one black. Two men. Their drama. Who are beautiful in this film. They are dancers, yes, but of the deep, vulnerable, inner spirit. In the strangeness of Butoh. Where it's raw, where movement is simplified, symbolic, intense. It's so intense! Emotion exploding out of this minimalist piece!

Gil and Tavares -are they the actors, the dancers? we don't know- added me as a 'friend' at YouTube, hence my checking them out... and I am so glad... I wish them great good fortune as a filmmakers!


[direct url: Abrasion #2]



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Please note that in my continued sharing of works that I like I am posting comments (and usually enlarging on them) that I have left at sites along with the work.

John F. Walter: 'The Room That Recurs'

Imagine these words etched on four walls by skilled hands
inside a calligraphy that effaced them and pointed to infinity,
regardless of what I or any other poet could have inscribed
within characters flowing out in currents of curls and loops,

our gilded vessels flourishing forth aglow with ancient light.
Envision the knots in polychrome tiles that framed these verses
and countless more swirled out here in a script whose letters
cognized as geometry when images failed to describe the world.

Blink. Shift your vision from flat crystallized squares--
turning sideways to cubes, then merging out of depth into octagons--
to a minute scale of witnessing. Eyeball blue, black, green tesserae,

like the rows of color pixels sprayed on the television screen
that you notice when you get up close and don't look through them
at the flicker synchronized with a scramble of voices.

Somehow these bits that tessellate along points, lines and planes
reveal how the walls they swarmed came to simulate a cosmos.

Gaze up at the starry roof. Don´t pretend my words matter there.
Language in time, prayer's isomorphs, this room: It's your own.

The Room That Recurs.

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'The Room That Recurs,' a perfect title for this poem on the calligraphies of our souls etched on Islamic tiles in Sufi mystical lettering that bursts and disappears like sparks leaving phosphorescent trails in the air. A divine alphabet, "characters flowing out in currents..." glow of "ancient light." A history of the written word implied in the sweep of the poem, a poetry of the word: "a script whose letters/ cognized as geometry when images failed to describe the world." This in the sacred geometry of our recurring 'room': our perception, the "gilded vessel" of our bodies' consciousness.

As if viewing images of tiles in the Alhambra, zooming in until they are single pixels of colour without defined shape, "from flat crystallized squares" to "turning sideways cubes, then merging out of depth into octagons," on the "minute scale of witnessing" we see "Eyeball blue, black, green tesserae."

On the microscopic planes, we are in the abstraction of our lives of form.

The poetic vision shifts from standing before an art that effaces its makers for a vision of "infinity," from the rarefied past to the ubiquitous television screen.

When we arrive at the pixelated world of the screen and its moving images it's perhaps different, perhaps not. Look through the narratives, the stories transmitted through the medium to the nature of the screen itself, "the rows of color pixels sprayed," the "synchronized" "scramble of voices."

These "bits that tessellate along points, lines and planes" swarm to "simulate a cosmos" that may or may not be an entrance into reality any more than the Islamic temple of calligraphy that is art.

"Gaze up at the starry roof," the dome of stars. Our language swirls in time's unwinding even as our humble poem to the universe is an isomorphic prayer.

Inhabit your room (your dwelling space, where the energy of life and consciousness comes to reside) of light.

We inhabit ourselves.

When we open our perceptions to our calligraphies, scripts to limn the world.

Cosmic vision. Infinity in an azulejo, a pixel. Holographs, "prayer's isomorphs."

An affirmative and beautiful poem.

(And one of my favourite of John's poems.)








John F. Walter



Decorative Tiles,' or Azulejos, Alhambra, Granada, Spain

Bliss Queen Webpage

The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss, a long tantric poem I wrote a few years ago is now a webpage at my site - a webpage that took 15 hours to create! I didn't get to bed until 6am this morning, & then up again by 9:30am to continue... it's the clash of limited html skills & my aesthetic... the hunt through the night for html that would make appear exactly what I wanted... as the sun was coming up I gave up on my quest to find anything that would work for the poem given Google's coding limitations, and fell asleep for a few hours before getting up with an idea for how to circumvent my html illiteracies and created what I sought in trustworthy PhotoShop... and uploaded it as a .jpg already stitched to the website's background that it carries with it... because I wanted an underlayer of transparent darkness to offset the Buddhist robe kashaya safron colouring of the poem's lettering.

The webpage that you see now is delicately composed in a network of hidden tables...

... Which is actually one table with many cells, of all sizes and some of which appeared randomly & mysteriously without any purpose and wouldn't delete without taking the whole edifice with them - lucky for the 'undo' key!

Where spreadsheet meets esoteric spirituality!

In the webpage; in the webpage.



Just took 'a peek' at the 'View/Page Source'
and holy tantric goddess!

Now I know what creation is.

Computer code
the incantation of our time!

Videotaped Reading: Mother of Milk, 2003

Mother of Milk, 2003 from Brenda Clews on Vimeo. (It takes 10-15sec to begin.)

I recorded this reading of "Mother of Milk" in my studio in Vancouver for ARM's 'Mothering, Religion and Spirituality' Conference.

Breastfeeding my two children until they weaned themselves, a total of five years, I went from filling my time with constant doing, a consumption of time, activities, ideas, to being able to be with the vast silence of the interior stillness. In this learning of a deeper rhythm which seemingly encompassed the discordant ambiguities, difficulties, discontinuities, traumas, and irreconcilable aspects, as well as the joys and unities, of my life my spiritual understandings and practices underwent a profound metamorphosis. While I would emphasize that there are many spiritual paths, and that all are equally valid, the particular path I found myself on arose directly out of my experiences as a mother-of-milk as I subsequently explored the concept of the ‘Divine Mother’ in ancient mythologies and modern religions, through meditation in a yoga tradition, and privately before my small alter at home, so that, while still emphatically a ‘woman in process,’ my experience of a feminist, goddess-oriented, empowering way of being could be be described as an ‘embodied spirituality.’

Videotaped in Vancouver, 2003
Copyright 2003 by Brenda Clews All Rights Reserved

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This is the DVD cover.






This was a personal essay, or perhaps prosepoem of a certain point of motherhood, and I recorded it in my studio in Vancouver (where I lived at the time) for a conference on "Motherhood and Spirituality" in 2003 in Toronto. The viewing was well received. Afterwards the CD went underground, and was in at least one art show, in 2004, at the Ayer Lofts Art Gallery in Massachusetts where it was one of the features of a video evening. Oh, and the prestigious Mothers Movement Online published it as an essay around that time too, and it's still online.

With my new iMac (ok it's almost a year old, but still feels "new":-) I found I was able to save this video as a .DIVX file, shortening it from the Quicktime 1.4GB .MOV file to 172MB .DIVX while not losing clarity in the smaller screen (as happened with the .MP4 file), and, even though it's 21 minutes long, was able to upload it, not to YouTube (which has a 10 minute maximum) but to Vimeo (which has no limit on the length of a video, only a size limit of 500MGs a week).

Because of Google Sites html limitations I can only embed a teeny tiny flash player that plays the reading at my new Art & Writings Website, it's real cute!

Birth Paintings, 1986-1989

It's only taken me 10 years to do this! A slideshow. Large enough to see. A page at my Art & Writings Website. Even a price sticker. The option to order art prints is always available and preferable.


(Click on the slideshow anywhere to go to Picasa and view a 'larger show.' If you have Cooliris installed, then of course you can view at fullscreen.)

From Brenda Clews, Birth Paintings 1987-1989

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Direct Link: Birth Paintings, 1987-1989

Women In Summer, 2008, Picasa Slideshow

Women In Summer, Oil paint, watercolour pencils, India ink on Waterford watercolour paper, 72.5cm x 52cm, 28.5" x 20.5"

I've posted a slideshow of the process of this painting before, but that was a Flickr slideshow (that I could only get to run backwards, if readers at that time recall), and this is a Picasa one (which runs forward very nicely, thank you Picasa). Apparently I did not keep the larger originals when I uploaded the series to Flickr. What. Else. Is. New. Hours spent searching on various hard drives and finally downloading what I'd uploaded at Flickr, and then uploaded to Picasa with embedded copyright info in each photo for the new Art Website.

Via an inserted 'Google Spreadsheet' I can get comments at my new Google Site art & poetry site! Sweet!

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

direct link to the slideshow: Women In Summer