Stone #29: Opposite Women Who Are The Same

Spring generates below the frozen ground. The green, the brown rising. Darkly.


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The stone, drawn from the stream-of-consciousness writing in the drawing.

In the endless greys, browns, taupes and whites of winter, I seem to be deeply missing the green! My subconscious offering compensatory imagery - or that's what it seems. Buried in masses of green.

While working on this drawing, I spilt half a bottle of olive green India ink, a colour that I had mixed from a sepia and a bright green, onto my La Cache tablecloth (the store no longer exists). That was a disaster. India ink is extremely permanent. Did I get it rinsed before doomsday in green? About 10 separate squirts of dish soap and rinses and me scrubbing with my hands. Finally I put it in a bucket with laundry detergent to soak.

Green floods my life.

I would say there is a black and a white sister here. They are a study in contrasts. Two very different lives and takes on life. Yet they are the same woman.

The drawing is overdone, I think. I began by using some pens that contain archival ink but work like markers and discovered that I don't really like them. At least now I know I prefer the more unsure and difficult ways ink flows from the nibs of fountain pens or dip pens. So much of what happens when it doesn't begin quite right is that you spend a lot of time 'saving' the work - a process that is sometimes successful, sometimes not. I added eggshell-coloured framing digitally. I like the close-up in the last scan.

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Dark Women, 2011, 20cm x 28cm, 8" x 11", India inks with dip pen and various fountain pen inks.

Scrawled, embedded words:

Who are we in our shadows? Explore a darker terrain. Welcome complexity, seething underbed where spring is already generating below the frozen ground, snow-filled land of ice. The green, the brown rising. Darkly. Look at the half-seen and explore the invisible. Does mystery make us apprehensive? Go deeper. Plunge.

Wrote the words that are embedded in the drawing next to it so that I would remember what they were. Yes, could be edited down, but later. The eggshell framing lines are drawn digitally.

I like the detail, click on it - it looks better larger.

Stone #28

...when the light casts two shadows, and you hear footsteps within footsteps, and you realize you're following yourself...

Photographer of White Clay

Your clay-whitened bodies covered with cracks like dry riverbeds on the surface of the moon.

Cracked and dry as a desert. Denuded of identity, warmth, flush skin tones. No bright highlights, no glamour. Bodies risen from clay pools, an earthen pottery.

No colour, erase difference. Frozen white ghosts on the edge of time, a sea of pale mud, a genesis.

You are Adam and Eve, the beginning of all beginnings, or the end of all endings. Face each other, relinquish your loneliness.

Your skin hardened like living statues in a dissolving Garden of Eden, the smeared powdered rock, breathing clay, imprisoned in your own beauty.

Or Butoh dancers, the anguish of the bomb that whitens into ash,
pain rising as dying reeds sway in the blackened river,
encase yourselves with white wet dust,
obliterate yourselves

In it, roll in it, emotion, explosive,
hidden in those primal masks,
naked in your ghostly forms,
raw spirits rising.

Pass beyond the eye
of my camera

To the dark side of the moon.

Sink into your bodies,
into each other.




(background music, a tiny section of 'Bodydrama at The Nave,' by ARTSomerville)

Statues in Profile (photograph will open in a new tab)

photo by Marko Kulik

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In response to a Big Tent poetry prompt: Write a poem about a portrait photograph that you did not take yourself: "The strategy this week is that you will imagine the photographer and write about the subject as if from the point of view of the photographer."

As a photographer, I am a director of the shot as I describe the poetry of the scene to the actors so that they can become what I am looking for.

See here for the prompt and links to the other poems.

Stone #27

the draft you deleted | remains an absence | in the final version || deleted images | indelible absences | in what remains

or:

the draft you deleted
remains an absence
in the final version

deleted images
indelible absences
in what remains

Stone #26

One rich, round, ripe Sardinian olive. Green, stuffed with pimento, steeped and plucked from a pot of salt, garlic and oil. Redolent.

Stone #25

sky, a grey wall of light against which trees are sculpted, fills, halftone, chiaroscuro, then the crumbling darkness

Dog Walk

I think we're going for a walk. My dog thinks we are going out to search for edible garbage.