Morning Pages: Starlings

what remains after the starlings have flown?

leaves shaking to stillness
where they held
caucus

____
Every day, with my morning coffee, I shall try to write a few lines in my 'writing' Moleskine. I have not made this task more difficult by insisting on an image as well. :)

After reading the news, and the issues that come up in Toronto City Hall's Council, which we are hearing far more about due to our strange and contrary mayor, and sitting by an open window, I wrote this little poem.

As if Death Were a Passion

As if Death Were a Passion, Brenda Clews, 2012, 12" x 16", graphite and acrylic on triple-primed cotton canvas sheet.

outline the skeleton
in red
make the lines of the bones
red

alizarin crimson, cadmium red
flame red, poppy bright

ok, blood too

the passion of death

as if death
were a passion


_________

It's taken many weeks for me to watch this great little instructional video on how to draw a skeleton. I've never taken anatomy, so I fully appreciate teaching tools like this (thank you Kenny Mencher!). I'll have to get myself a wee skeleton at a Medical Supply store at some point. :)

I meant to take a photo before I started working it. Ah well. It's not perfectly drawn because I don't want that.

The instructional video is here: http://kenney-mencher.blogspot.ca/2011/11/video-drawing-skeleton-front-view.html?m=1 (if, like me, you'll probably watch it later do bookmark it since it's an unlisted video you won't be able to find it on YouTube without the link)

I took the photo with my iPhone 4 using Camera+ and then a Clarity filter - later I'll blog it without the filter. It's just kind of neat with the tones the filter gives it.

Celestial Dancer V put out on the street and taken!

I've been clearing out a lot of stuff the last few weeks, many bags of clothes to the drop-box, lots simply to garbage. This painting was one of the first I did with water-soluble oil paints in 2004. I did it on a canvas board - dumb, the cardboard warps, impossible to frame ever - and I didn't really like it. I drew it from an image of Nijinski in a dark body stocking, so always felt, though I love the richness of black skin, that this painting was a bit misleading even though it was grouped with my Celestial Dancer series and called it Celestial Dancer V.

Last weekend cleaning up my art supplies, I came across it wedged behind my desk, where it's been stored for years. I pulled it out, not sure what to do with it. The thought of standing on it to crack it in half for the garbage was too much at that moment.

On impulse, I took it outside and put it against the fence on the sidewalk. When I looked 5 minutes later, it was gone.

I hope whoever found it either likes it and has hung it on wall that needed 'something,' or has painted over it.

I'm so delighted that I did this that I'm considering what else I can put out! :)



When I looked for a photo of the painting on an external hard drive where the contents of my old computer are stored, I found it, not only easily because labelled, but that I had, as usual, taken images all along the way. And I even found the original image I drew! How wild is that. I have not, as yet, been able to re-locate the Nijinski on-line to see which ballet he was leaping about in a dark body stocking in! He had a slick of glitter on his costume that I did not add to my painting. :) This piece was done in my studio in Vancouver - as you'll see in the final image (they work backwards). I also used a wet-on-wet technique and so lost some of the detail in one of the arms that clearly turned into a lake of paint that dissolved out and in the detail of the hands.

Two Lamps and a Pot of Orchids

This is a sketch to toss. Part of my enterprise this year: to go backward to go forward. To return to before I got sidetracked and see where a more natural route would take me.

Two Lamps and a Pot of Orchids, Brenda Clews, 2012, 13" x 10", acrylic on archival paper.

The charcoal sketch.

Retreat to Beautiful Objects

direct link: Retreat to Beautiful Objects

When I retreated to my world of beautiful objects.

She was a dream, not the mask but how I composed her in Tangled Garden.

A vegetative force, Nature, birth, life, death, decay, mulch, compost. Beautiful and frightening. Strange dreams, the unknowable body itself. Life consuming life to live, plant or animal. Cells fuse to make new life, new connections, new hybrids. Wood/trees; metal/circuitry; bone/grafts; skin/love. Teeming presence.

I come from a jungle, the nature I write of is not pastoral, pretty. A fibrous network of vast connections. Natural processes. We are Nature looking at herself through her own eyes. This slip of consciousness viewing the universe for a knowing moment, soon to be lost. How can we forget the hungry ghosts, the floral opera singing in us?

An ecology of consciousness. An understanding of the parasitical and angelic. Leave the savageries. Our worlds of beautiful objects call us to retreat.

_________________________________________________________




What I wrote at YouTube:

...to celebrate the unexpected popularity of my long videopoem, Tangled Garden, http://youtu.be/OG37qWh4rTM, a slow art film of a triptych of earth poems, Surreal, mythopoetic, a rhizoma of images, metaphors, explorations, philosophies (with English subtitles). I had originally thought to paint a Tangled Garden painting to give away when the video reached 1500 views (my daughter's claimed the painting, so some other celebratory gift), and began making a video of the process of the painting.

There's lots of aspects here - from the drawing and painting itself to photos of the making of the papier-mache mask, to a dance in the woods which inspired the figures in the painting. The fishnet gloves - don't you adore them! - will now be featured in any future art videos. I just love them!

The writing came out of a dream I was having during a nap when I was considering what to say in the video. It's more of a piece about the poetic process in the poems in Tangled Garden, what sort of consciousness is holding sway. I woke up laughing. I felt a bit strange laughing all by myself in a dark room late at night for the recording for sure!

Prefer the video without the subtitles, but they're there for the hearing impaired, those who like to read along, and for YouTube automatic translation into one of 25 languages if the viewer is not fully conversant in English.

Music is Pierre-Marie Cœdès' 'Whirling Thoughts,' from his album, "Insomnia": http://www.jamendo.com/en/list/a94667/insomnia (with his permission). It is a great album, do go and listen.

Torn

Torn, Brenda Clews, 2012, 11" x 15", charcoal and watercolour on archival paper.

Everyday I am going to try to work on a drawing or painting (I've been working long hours on a painting video; other times, I'm reading, or writing).

Today I tested charcoal and then drew a skeleton from which emerged a woman. Since she has a basket of fruit, which are probably apples, she's come in from her tree, whose shadow I almost drew next to her too.

After I made the little drawing I understood that the woman was shredded in some way internally, where you can't see. The paper was torn deliberately along certain pathways to enhance the internal state in the way that you see here. I will glue it leaving those edges detached so that the shadows of the paper itself remain.

A few sketches and a cleaned-up back yard!

A very few pieces this week to share.

A poem should go with this. :) 

In my little charcoal sketch book.

 (Lovely orchids my niece gave me for my birthday nearly 3 months ago drawn in charcoal.)

'Woman at the Window,' 2012, small charcoal and watercolour sketch. Really just a doodle, like the above post.

I have a blister in the middle of my right palm from digging weeds for a couple of hours! I neglected my tiny bit of back yard, and then the heat, and suddenly I want to have it - only the weeds! Eeek. They produce burrs by late summer and I have a doggy whose fur is a favourite of burrs. Mostly they're all dug out now - my son came and raked too, and we filled about 4 garden bags - and a new bag of shady grass seed bought - to be spread just before a rain storm (no water out back). Doodles, heck, yes! Even with blisters in the middle of your palm. :))

So pleased with myself! In 2009 I smartly stapled up two bamboo mats to block the view from the lane way into my little back yard. They began seriously shredding last summer and were fast becoming mulch after this last winter. I mulled a trip to Chinatown for more mats, which, with my wrist, I would need help with carrying back. I checked tarps at the hardware store. The young sales clerk there had the very good idea to weave it into the planks of the fence. The colour though - bright white! Definitely no! Then I found camouflage tarp at the dollar store for considerably less. And I wove and stapled it by myself! Without straining my wrist - getting a very strong right arm! Now my son won't have to help. And I'm sipping a strawberry rhubarb cider on a chaise longue in wonderful privacy!