Some paintings in WATER H20, a group art show by the Toronto ART Collective at Tantra Lounge & Bar

'Water Dance' and 'Spring Rain Garden God' are in WATER H2O, a group art show at Tantra Lounge, 1157 St Clair W (Dufferin and St Clair) for the month of August. The Opening Reception is tomorrow night, 7pm-11pm. I am performing 'Ink Ocean,' my poem on oil spills, ink, the way we compose our realities, during the early part of the Opening. I am grateful to John Oughton, who will accompany me and who composed the music for this poem with his electric guitar and magic box of sounds. Other poets will be reading and there will be two bands as well. Tantra Lounge and Bar offers a menu of Indian, Middle Eastern and Western dishes. It looks to be a fun evening. Over 20 artists are in the show. The Facebook Event Page is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1611304332491221.

The paintings are each 30" x 40", oil on canvas.

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YouTube Saves ALL your RAW ORIGINAL VIDEO FILES at FULL SIZE and YOU CAN RETRIEVE THEM!

Wow. YouTube saves ALL your RAW ORIGINAL VIDEO FILES! I am unbelievably grateful. A few years ago, a hard drive crashed and I lost the originals of many of my videopoems. But a few Google searches over a few days for how to download HD versions, and, buried in links, I found an article explaining how I can download an Archive of all my videos from YouTube - the archive is 183GB and came in 60 downloads. Tangled Garden, for instance, is 16.1GB, which is what I recall it was. EVERYTHING is there, high resolution .Mpeg-4s. Wow, just wow.

'You now have an option to download all your YouTube videos in their original resolution – whether its SD or HD. Here’s how:

Go to https://google.com/takeout and click the Create Archive button. Google will now create a zipped archived with all the videos that you have ever uploaded to YouTube. Once the archive says 100%, proceed to the Downloads tab to grab the actual files. If the archive is large, Google Takeout will split them into individual files of 2 GB each.'

from http://www.labnol.org/internet/download-youtube-videos/9139/

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Poetry and Drawing at PRIDE

Here is a slideshow video I put together of all the photographs I took at A Divine Afternoon.

From Poetry Salons at Urban Gallery

A 1:15min slideshow of all the pics from yesterday's A Divine Afternoon Urban Gallery hosted by Trasharella (Philip Cairns) in honour of PRIDE. The music clip is from Amoeba Starfish's 'In Bali.' I made the slideshow movie in Picasa where there aren't many options for text.

                      

Trasharella (Philip Cairns), 9" x 12", ©BrendaClews, A Divine Afternoon @ Urban Gallery in Honour of PRIDE, 27 June 2015, graphite and other media on Strathmore 400 Series acid free drawing paper.

My drawing of Trasharella yesterday while he read at a poetry event. Philip didn't like the drawing, or so he said when I showed him at the time. But I coloured it in anyhow today with water-soluble media that I wet with a brush. It is what it is.

I know I said that I would not be colouring these drawings anymore, and looking at the scans, I wonder if I could have better spent those hours (of colouring, wetting and working with a brush and scanning) doing something else.

This is the quick sketch I did of Trasharella in 2013, which Philip does very much like.

Postscript: Philip bought both drawings.

Trasharella

Trasharella (Philip Cairns) - 27 June 2015 - changing after 'A Divine Afternoon,' a poetry salon in honour of Pride, at Urban Gallery in Toronto. Photo (taken and then photoshopped) copyright © by Brenda Clews.

I was originally 'in the mirror' taking the cell phone shot, but I removed myself and placed Philip/Trasharella, who were in transformation, there instead.

I like it.

Trailer for an Upcoming Videopoetry Performance

direct link: Trailer for Upcoming Videopoem Performance

A short trailer for my upcoming feature! I'm presenting and performing three of my videopoems at Shab-e She'r next Tuesday evening, June 30th. As a multi-media artist, I am very excited to be showing my craft- poems, art, dance, video. It's at 7pm, Beit Zatoum, 612 Markham St., Toronto (Bloor and Bathurst), cover: $5.

Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/911027915631459
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The photo for the still is from a poetry event where I performed A Floral Opera and was taken by Josef Hochleitner. The Ink Ocean clips in the trailer are from that same performance, though the video has been given multiple visual 'treatments.'

She is still Untitled, but almost finished....

Untitled, work-in-progress, ©Brenda Clews 2015, 16" x 20", oil on canvas.

What I'm considering: toning down the blue lady on the right with a patina of white when she is dry; toning down that knee-shaped pillow (that echoes the saron lady's bent knee) or adding another pillow between them.

Otherwise, it is almost finished, finally.

This is a 'poem painting' and the title will be a line from one of my poems. This painting is a return to a love of paint, raw wild colour, mystical figures, a composition of depth and flatness, linear and with blocks of colour. Perhaps I should call it 'Before Conceptualism,' because that is what I am returning to.

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More sketches of poets at readings around the city

Lorraine Gane @ The Art Bar

Margaret Christakos @ The Art Bar

Gianna Patriarca @ Vino Rosso

Gene Wong @ The Art Bar

About the only life drawing I am doing these days - I do enjoy sketching poets and musicians, if they're relatively still, that is! I've thrown out quite a few water-soluble colour ink drawings that did not work to my eye and I've decided to stick with a .9mm technical pencil with a B or 2B lead for now. (Though in Gianna's drawing I did add some fine black Pitt pen.)