My Nook in 360° Photos, & painting...

A neat iPhone app, 360 Panorama, that takes, and stitches together, 360° photos. From one taken last night, and another today, you can see I work in a very small space  - my studio, study, meditation space, recording studio, sewing nook, sleeping space (for both person & doggy).

360 View: http://360.io/zaFDum


Nighttime shot.


*Note, to better see the whole photo below: Click the minus or smaller ' - button' to decrease the size of it in the panorama view. (Just don't do it on drugs.)


360 View: http://360.io/Myhzfh


Daytime shot, no it's not that disorganized! It's positively hallucinated in this surround photo! I love it! My room never looked so good!

The room is very organized - two huge baskets of sea-grass hold many journals, smaller baskets tucked in the shelf hold paints, finishes, varnishes, jars hold brushes and pens; always some lidded filled small water jars nearby for quickly working; various easels, boards and larger papers stored between desk and wall; and a large tray with A4 Moleskine notebooks, water-based oil pastels, watercolour pencils and a dozen jars of ink sits on the desk, and so on. My desk is my studio, but it can turn quickly into a study or a sewing nook. ::smiles::

Wishing so desperately to work on larger paintings I finally hit on a potential solution. Room is too small for comfortable easel painting. Ended up here when my kids moved back with me. It's ok, no complaints. I love them dearly.

Anyway, I purchased a 24" x 18" canvas pad of triple-gessoed canvas. To buy a strip of gessoed canvas from a roll would have been cheaper, but that's only single-gessoed, and not stretched. Couldn't deal with stretching - it's a humidex of 40° in this apartment! The pad has 10 sheets, which will last years at the rate I work, and if faster, hey that's great.

So I taped it to a light board, and you can see the blank canvas sheet in the 360° photo. I was inspired by Robin Mead's experimentation with water-soluble pastels that she posted recently. She was wetting them and spreading them as background (I think). I've had mine for some years and never thought of doing this.

Anyway, it was much harder than I thought it would be. The water-based pastel does not adhere that well to triple-glazed gesso. Any drops of water took the colour out leaving a white splotch. It all took far longer than I had anticipated. I had to work over it a few times. I gave up on doing the fairly even patina I had originally planned and went for more of a flow approaching a marbling perhaps - though this morning it looks more like a Monet water lily (!). But it is so delicate, I'm not sure how it will hold water-soluble oil paints (all I use) or inks. I've sprayed it with a matte fixative. No idea if that will work to hold it or if there'll be problems with inks and paints adhering.

Anyway, here's a photo taken in the sunlight just now of the background I prepared last night. I want to draw on it, etc., in a free, imaginative way and not worry about where it's going. Learning my way in to this.


background, 18" x 24" canvas sheet, water-soluble oil pastels.

                              

Difficult Memories

This is going to be hard. He won't divorce me, though we separated 14 years ago and he has been living Common Law with another woman for 13 years. I've been browsing my old journals that I brought out of storage recently. Yesterday I posted a 'found' poem from lines and images found in some journals from 1980. The ones I have been dipping into tonight are harder. A thesis I didn't finish. The death of my beloved father. Marriage, perhaps out of desperation, perhaps out of a strange love, who knows anymore. It's not as if none of this happened before we were married.

Friday, August 30, 1985.

10:55am

For the first time I watched one of B's violent episodes manifest.

Last weekend, when he was changing the kitty litter in the basement washroom, he accidentally knocked one of the 'arms' on the toilet roll holder. With sharp anger he suddenly kicked the whole thing, tearing it off the wall. I said, "You idiot," and got out of the way fast. At dinner on Monday, he told me about telling the bear story [from a camping trip] to a man at work,  and how he thumped his desk suddenly with his hands --womp!-- at the moment of his telling about hearing the bear and how that man jumped. I did, too, as he mimetically smashed the table we were sitting at, making it jump. Visiting C and S, they were relating C's problems with S's grandfather visiting from England in that he excluded C from family photos because he wasn't of the "D's [family's] line." B said, "I would tell him to FUCK OFF," as he suddenly punched the air with  a force that would have knocked anyone cold had they been the recipient of it. C and S were noticeably, but momentarily, alarmed at B's violent motion. Last night B and I were haggling over household bills as we entered the last 10 months' collection on SuperCalc. At one point, he flung a binder of mine with a calculator in it on the floor, causing all the contents, even those in small pockets to fly out. I grabbed it and lightly tapped him for doing that so needlessly. Oh boy. He stood up on the couch and began punching me, my chest, my arm. I started shouting, "You have no control! Stop it!!" while fending off his blows. He shouted that he hated me. I continued, "Just because you feel weak and powerless sometimes do you think that beating up your wife is going to make you feel stronger?!"

"You bitch," he frothed, still punching me.

"How can you do this to the woman you love?" I shouted as I tried to defend myself. "Alright!" I stopped, "If you want to beat me up, go ahead and do it!!" Without an opponent, he subsided. He doesn't like the image of himself as a wife-beater. Ever since I began using this tactic it has invariably diffused his violence. I don't get nearly so bruised or bloodied, which is a relief, because if I don't somehow diffuse his attacks they are terrible. He has no in-built mechanism for controlling himself.

Afterward I just cried and cried. He refused to talk about what had just happened, but did 'make up.' I sent him off to buy cigarettes and continued crying, feeling sorry for myself, wondering how I had ever gotten into such a relationship.

There's more, of course... many paragraphs. Then, at 3:00pm that day I wrote:

How I dislike writing about these fights. Who wants to commit this sort of thing to paper? I hate myself for doing it -- what if someone were to inadvertently read what I write here.... I do it because I'm confused by these extremes, these violent episodes, and... try to understand. I can't talk about what goes on to anyone.
_

Why did I feel I had to hide what was going on from everyone? Why was I ashamed? He blamed me for his anger. Perhaps I was trying to heal him; perhaps I didn't believe in my own worth. It is now 26 years later, and still I struggle to speak.

                              

La Luna: a draft of the poem

A poem I composed from lines found in three of my tightly written, packed journals from 1980. I may or may not use it as the voiceover poem in the video of the crazy moon I'm playing with presently.

La Luna

razors of lightning press my eyelids
your white love, the pearl shell seas
the sky peels back like a scroll
you are mine, unsplitted, fleshless

cornucopias, hot-bed undersea growths of things
joined to other things in sections, in shell lines

mad shadows. my blood is full of alcohol

memory is internally roused, without evasion

I open the door to your shadowed face, dark hair, beard-
those fluid sea-algae, jade-green eyes
do they absorb or reflect light?

light is a tumbling ball
the moon is a lunatic
there is a lady on the telegraph pole

each man or woman who enters has to leave
their personality behind like tossed clothes

pastel lightning crosses the sky
the moon is a fetish
a fat, marshmallow moon
the moon contemplates itself
a blood moon

words are a wash of waves;
waves of a ceaseless alphabet

my throat is a silent, howling hyena
the illness of passion

I've been caught

where is the land; where is the vessel?

lapped wind and frothed cloud
mutant moon
- a glowing field of electrical fabric -

vision is dangerous

this fragile moon letter of white light

the white imagination that you have to travel
through the prism to get to

when I'm in love I'm outside of what
I'm inside of the rest of the time



I follow the moon
am nothing but motion
...............following
streets marked by lights
as round as moons

am nothing
but shadows of light

as the moonlight
careens drunkenly in the sky

shrouds hide me
while the moon dances

a hallucinated ball

of white wind

shorn of darkness
dance naked night
my eyes flutter
in the tops of trees

spirits gather and flee

you have gone



direct link: La Luna

Music by Arnold Wohler, 'Larghetto espressivo' from his album, "Quintett für Flöte, Geige, Gitarre, Klavier und Cello in 5 Sätzen."