Barry Gross... a video on an artist

Barry Gross from damian fitzsimmons on Vimeo.
A mini-documentary on the painter, Barry Gross. Directed by Damian Fitzsimmons, produced by Tyler Ford. A Blue Hour Films Production.


Self-taught, Barry Gross has followed his muse all his life. A unique, intimate and finely done video of the artist showing a moment in time of the way he works and his work. Watching, and listening to him talk, I realize how visionary his art is. This video's a beauty.

                                          

This is New Year's, if I follow my natural rhythms

Easter Sunday morning always I am depressed. Like I'm under the earth kind of depressed, not sad, or forlorn. Just dead. And by afternoon I feel I'm rising into the air, happy, renewed. A new year is beginning.

Today I realized that my new year is the full moon after the vernal equinox. Passover, Easter, and take a look at April in Wikipedia for the countries and religions, mostly Asian and East Asian, celebrating their New Year this month.

The winter brings increasing exhaustion, weaker and weaker it continues, until today. On Easter Sunday morning it's like I'm buried, decomposing with the termites; I can smell the dank earth of transformation. My inner being shifts today.

By mid-day, the strengthening begins. Energy awakens, renewal has begun. My new year begins.

My spirits rise, I am enlivened.
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This poem, in 2006, and it's still the same, every year.

Eostre, Or Cross of Sheer Light

I found myself ebbing
away, and so I fasted.
When my commitment to
life renewed itself, I broke
my fast.

If you've ever been dead and come back to life,
been hopeless and found a way to continue,
thrown yourself into nothingness to find meaning.

An elusive tune,
slender wash of light,
bare opening in the wall,
a sliver, crescent through which.

Or what's a moment but a casting through.
If you've been too tired to get up and then you get up.
Filled with silent despair and then the will to.

Nothing's even, that's the problem. Many impermanent states.
All taking turns or colliding. Interpenetrating or scattering.
Flowing or stuck. Constraining or freeing.

I like to have clean thoughts because then I can live in my mind.
Sometimes the dust, anger, grime.
Throw what's scathing out.

I feel your bright and beautiful presence
even if you feel like you've disappeared into nothing.

The edges of the sky hang like an aurora borealis of silk.

The trompe l'oeil of the moment. Discreet packets of time.
If you didn't tell me I was going to die, I wouldn't believe it.

And then the scaffolding crashed, blocks fell apart,
what resisted melted, and it was time to resurrect.
Passing beyond memory into. Or the rising.


©Brenda Clews
Good Friday, 2006
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photographic path: a photo I took of sheer fabric over light, cropped, layered on itself, rotated, made somewhat transparent; then I may have used a marque tool to crop the uppermost layer to better reveal the brocade ribbon below, or was that one of the trajectories I didn't use; various marque tools to crop the right & left edges of the uppermost layer on right angles; the stamp tool to fill in a line that was left over from who knows what process; the burn tool to darken the upper and bottom right corners for visual balance. A collage I composed after writing the poem...

This is a photopoem: I've digitally embedded the poem in the image along with copyright information.

                                          

reBirth from a track that doesn't work

  dance/ ...indigo folio leaves by Brenda Clews

The audio track from a video poem, worked a little differently for an audio only version. Prose poetry, voice, mix by moi; music: José Travieso's track, 'Monster,' on his album, "No More Faith."

You can watch the video poem in this blog, or at YouTube.

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The next day: listening, no, I don't think this recording works. The sound of the breath is okay in the dance video but here it is bothersome. And it looks like I didn't fully remove the former filters from the clip right at the end, which is alright in the recording I guess.

Anyway, I think to make something listenable I need to re-record the prose poem, perhaps layer it in the style I was developing in my last poetry album. A style I haven't continued exploring because, except for one person, no-one commented on, or even mentioned their response to the intricacy of all that layering of readings of single poems. Virtually none of the musicians whose music I used came by my Jamendo site to leave a comment and so I took that to mean they did not particularly like my experiments.

But, who knows? Everyone is so busy and working on their own stuff. I work mostly in a vacuum of silence and keep going, well I have no idea how. And I have experience from the past - the explosion of painting that produced the birth paintings in about a year (mostly from about May 1986-May 1987), and such a difficult topic, especially in those early days of 'women speaking their bodies,' left me feeling that I had accomplished something. But everyone who came to my house remained fixedly silent on them (ten were framed on my wall). I submitted them to an art show and was politely told they were not appropriate to show publicly, and to a 'feminist' magazine, and the photos were returned to me two years later in a brown envelope, no letter, no note, just a sense of anger emanating from that rejection. It was numbing, hard. It wasn't until around 2000 that I began to receive accolades on them, and some were used as journal covers, and one of the reasons I set up an accessible art website was because I get one or two academics requesting use of them in seminar or conference presentations every year.

And now we are nearly 25 years later, and the birth paintings continue to evoke strong and positive responses. I just have to remember how I was treated during the first ten years after producing them. The silence, the disapproval. Oh, people liked the colours. But the subject, the woman's growing belly, the opposite of the femme fatale, and birthing, the baby emerging from her, oh, it was too much for people in those days I guess.

Sort of like my poetry readings, video poems, and video dance poems. Perhaps. Who knows? Perhaps my current work isn't that good. I am unable to judge myself as others would see me. I only know that personally I feel I am amassing quite an oeuvre, and am accomplishing a multi-media art that incorporates and crosses disciplines and boundaries that leaves me mostly feeling good about myself.

But then, I always get self-reflective on Easter Sunday, depressed and resurrectory. It's a day of reBirth.

                                          

dance/ ...indigo folio leaves [audio]

  dance/ ...indigo folio leaves by Brenda Clews

The audio track from a video poem, worked a little differently for an audio only version. Prose poetry, voice, mix by moi; music: José Travieso's track, 'Monster,' on his album, "No More Faith."

You can watch the video poem in this blog, or at YouTube.