Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Books to Come

Good news. I received a contract from Quattro Books to publish my novella in the Spring of 2017 (my poetry book with Guernica Editions is coming out this Fall). Another publisher sent a response that made me feel that rare thing, understood as an author, and I consider it my first review: "We found your formal experimentation with "S*'s" characterization highly appealing, in the way it plays at the boundaries of poetry to reflect the sensuousness of experience. Overall, we felt it was an accomplished work."

My book has found the right home. Lovely to join the Quattro family!!!
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 brendaclews.com

Thursday, January 07, 2016

Digital Drawing of Split Mask


Still working on my performance videopoem, Split Mask. It's subtly complex visually and the editing program is on overdrive. I kind of like this drawing/crop I did in Photoshop - it took hours to figure out, with lots of trial and error and starting over and over, drawing with a stylus, and so it is a digital drawing more than anything.
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 brendaclews.com

Wednesday, January 06, 2016

Burning Mask


This is kind of a cool nanosecond in my upcoming performance videopoem, Split Mask.

The line:
"The mask,
a paper image
burning."

[Aftereffect: Ten minutes later, finding it too bright,  I went in and keyframed the opacity of the flames, and so the moment as it appears here no longer exists in the videopoem.]
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 brendaclews.com

Ganged Up On By My Muse, I Am!


Another 2 second image from my forthcoming performance videopoem, Split Mask.

I've performed this poem a number of times around the city in features and on open mic in the mask, which I made in the Spring of 2013, and which insisted on a political poem, that was begun in the Summer of 2013 and completed in the Summer of 2014, and then they insisted on a 5' square painting, which I painted in a mad frenzy over 3 days at the very end of 2013 for a solo show at Urban Gallery in January and February of 2014, and now the mask, the poem, the painting are insisting I finish a videopoem, begun in the Fall of 2014, and not yet complete.

If I get the performance videopoem done this year, if, it will be a 3 year project! From 2013-2016. All begun with a little image in my consciousness that wouldn't go away and which I had to make: the split mask.

Oy ya, what's a gal supposed to do? Ganged up on by my muse, I am.

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 brendaclews.com

Self-Portrait with a Fascinator 2016

On Monday, I walked, buying frames from two stores in different parts of the city, then went to the Art Bar Poetry Series in the evening, ab...