Canada Day 2012

When I first came to Canada, it didn't even have its own flag. I remember the flag competition, and that the maple leaf chosen wasn't my favourite of the designs.

The drawing I did today is somewhere between skinless vulnerability and the goalie's hockey mask. Ambiguities and paradoxes abound.

Canada Day 2012, Brenda Clews, 27.9cm x 21.6cm, 11" x 8.5", graphite, charcoal, red Bombay India ink on Fierro paper.

An interesting graphic of stats in Canada compiled by a design team in a free newspaper, 24H, that I was given exiting a subway a few days ago.

I clipped this to a table-top easel and have been staring at it for a few days, and now it seems part of the sketch (with its overly largish maple leaf considering the height of the borders).

Spring God gets more paint

Today I worked on this painting. While I can't say for certain, likely it is finished.

He's on my bedroom wall, where the light hits the paint just right, and finally I like this painting. So that's a relief. :) He has more substance now, and looks like he could stand up and shake the rain clouds loose.

Spring God, 24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, oils on stretched canvas.

Below, earlier versions. I began this painting on March 30th, 2012, at a Toronto School of Art friday night drop-in non-instructional life painting session. The model was working on a B.A. in English Literature at York University, I recall. The one to the far right is what I did that night.


                        

Poems written in Pamphlets

Considering making a videopoem of my last poem: *Can I Be Fired Or Laid Off Without Notice?*

While it's an explicit reference to our mortality, and I hope that's pretty obvious, I actually wrote the poem in a pamphlet put out by CLEO (Canadian Legal Education Ontario) entitled, 'Have you been fired or laid off?' on workers' rights.

I didn't have any paper, and so grabbed something at hand and wrote inbetween the paragraphs.

As you can see in my photo, with my bluetooth keyboard for my iPhone, and Songa, my adorable kitten. When I got the pamphlet to take a photo for you, she just *had* to get in on the action. :)

Anyway, I would perform the poem with a green screen of things like bread lines, perhaps headlines referring to the worsening 'recessions' since 2008, and especially the crises in Europe.

All of which, to my simple mentality, is due to the interest payments on debts.

I refuse to own any credit cards due to that interest payment issue. Nor do I have any loans, etc. While I live on the edge financially, I live without debt.

If the ridiculous interest payments could be deleted, and any payments from indebted countries, like Greece, Spain, etc., and innumerable third world countries, made on the actual loans themselves, the crisis would be over.

Why do we live like this when we are eating our own flesh, so to speak. Yes, yes, Shakespeare and _The Merchant of Venice_, but it's the greed of Capitalism itself that has installed itself in the hearts of the financially powerful.

I could froth all day. +Lena Levin and I had a long discussion (on G+) about credit cards recently, and I'm sure that fed into my poem.

Which you can find here:http://brendaclews.blogspot.ca/2012/06/can-you-be-fired-or-laid-off-without.html?m=1



--
Sent from my iPhone

Can You Be Fired or Laid Off Without Notice?

Cling to the thin breast
of stars grazing your hair;
starlight shines vacant 
in your eyes.

On this globe revolving in mad
abundance, careening
off-course

in our dreams

where spiders feed us silk
from their mandibles;
and the strawberries are sour

studded with green eyes
watching from red lanterns.

What light to see by is this?

Scattered unripe fruit, the world
overtaken by insects.

Push the shopping cart through
the storm of shredded light.

Let breaking branches scratch
your face. The wind is your voice.

Night spins hallucinating
a starry nest.

We are broken illuminations
falling.

Dust of starlight.

Caught in a web
spun in silk fire fibres.

Pull your hair
from your dirty face.
Wipe off stardust, like grime.

Magic is a spider eye
in a world of compound debt.

Survival, man, woman,

is the song
to spin singing

on dangling
thread.

Solar Eclipse

Solar Eclipse, 2012, Brenda Clews, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil on canvas. 

I just took the photo in bright sun and the upper left corner is too shiny, bright (someday I will get a better camera to take photos of these paintings I promise). Overall, the colours are quite good. If you've been following these posts, you might notice that I've corrected the arm - the model had it over a pillow but I didn't paint it that way so it seemed too large - I've shortened it so that it is now in better proportion and also painted in more indication of the hand. Later on I may add a few more colours to the bottom of her sarong, which seems to enclose her as a fitted cocoon-like sleeping bag somehow, to make it more 'landscape,' or that a nightscape river is flowing through her. 

The whole painting is Surreal, figures in a psychic landscape of the dreaming imagination.

A painting with a textual history, meaning a history of texture. It was another painting before. On my wall for half a year, and I couldn't look at it anymore. (See album of earlier painting here: (https://picasaweb.google.com/103243515693467499824/MidnightSunWindOverGrass?authuser=0&feat=directlink) Deciding not to sand the canvas, or even prime it, I began painting over the original painting on Saturday afternoon. 

At this point, I do like it. So it may be done, not sure. Back up on the wall it goes. The true test is how liveable is it?

Solar Eclipse

Solar Eclipse, 2012, Brenda Clews, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil on canvas. 

A painting with a textual history, meaning a history of texture. It was another painting before. On my wall for half a year, and I couldn't look at it anymore. (See album of earlier painting here: (https://picasaweb.google.com/103243515693467499824/MidnightSunWindOverGrass?authuser=0&feat=directlink) Deciding not to sand the canvas, or even prime it, I began painting over the original painting yesterday afternoon. 

At this point, I do like it. So it may be done, not sure. Back up on the wall it goes. The true test is how liveable is it?

Midnight Sun (a new figurative painting)

Midnight Sun, in-process, 2012, Brenda Clews, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil on canvas.

A painting with a textual history, meaning a history of texture. It was another painting before. On my wall for half a year, and I couldn't look at it anymore. Deciding not to sand the canvas, or even prime it, I began painting over the original painting this afternoon (see the album of what is underneath here: Midnight Sun). It may be done, not sure. The true test is, how liveable is it?

(The colours are pretty good, but the main figure has pink in her body and that is not appearing.)