Tea Ceremony

Tea Ceremony, 10"x7¾", 25.5x19cm, coloured India inks, pencils on archival unbleached paper.

Earlier versions: ink drawing; mid-way.



Tea Ceremony

The grace in living,
teapot, tea leaves, steeping.
She bends to pour.

When the waters
washed away the homes.
Clotted blood
of his wounds.
Petals floating on dirges.

Yet laughter of lovers,
her heart of memory.
Landscapes of green
move through us.

Comfort of the gentle
and exact tea ceremony.
Love is everything
the great artist sings.

©Brenda Clews, 2009

                                 

Returning to a Celestial Dancer

The background was painted five years ago, and today I determined to finish the painting. Nightfall has come, and no. Perhaps tomorrow. She is one of my Celestial Dancers. Why do I resist her?

My apartment is small; my two children, son, 22, daughter, 18, live with me. That is my dining room table, yes.

We make room for our art, we have to.

                                 

Navigation buttons for website

I've put my website buttons (that I use as a 'signature' in each blog post) in a table ( that you can't see because I gave '0' border to the lines so they are invisible) to see if they line up better at sites that link here. The html I used at the site has the images sit in a nice row, but I notice that places like Facebook put each image on its own line underneath the post. I'm hoping the invisible table solves the problem.

While the spacing between icons isn't quite right, it's close enough, and, if the table works, I can fiddle with that later. Also, probably I need to add another webpage & link - so there is an 'intro' page, and a 'recent paintings' page. So far, I haven't been able to figure out how to arrange the 'intro' page the way I'd like - though I've tried a few things, none of them have worked.

There is much writing that I have yet to add to the site as well - though that'll be embedded with links to unlisted pages in the website here & there.

:-)

Julie McGregor's Art: A Spectral Mine

Julie McGregor's art is figurative, richly coloured, with dense backgrounds of oil embedded into the canvas. An heir of the Impressionists and the Group of Seven, she takes the palette further, exploring the nuances and depths of her subjects, their beauty, their slight asymmetries, the way they are contained in the multi-coloured brushwork she has sculpted them out of. Not just thick light revealing the features of her figures, but the surfaces glow with jewel-like dabs and dashes giving the sense of a spectral mine illumined from within by its precious ores. In all of her works an inner power emanates, as if from the energies of the earth itself. Check out her paintings. Beautiful.

Julie McGregor is a Toronto artist and jazz singer.