Been working on my Art & Writings website, put up two pages: "Women in Spring, Summer, Autumn & Winter, 2008-2009," and, finally, a "Lifedrawings" page, and redid the Navigation Buttons. You can see the Navigation Buttons below every post, and they are active links to those pages at my website - and you can see which page with a mouse-rollover. I've changed a few of the images, with intention to change the last three whenever. I only put up this website last June but already it is filling up. I've been working on it for 12 hours straight today, finding images, re-sizing them, dealing with html, positioning, layout, etc. etc, and was up till 3am last night a-werking on-the-website.

☆sort of tired☆ of .( ․or perhaps high from°☆.․ ․:)♥staring at a pixelated screen♥:))))♪♫¸¸


                                                    

Women In Spring, 2008

I've spent the last few hours locating these images between two computers, and attempting to represent the colour accurately by uploading, fiddling in Photoshop Elements, uploading... you get the idea. They are larger images than I have previously uploaded.

Hopefully in Picasa I'll figure out how to do 'individual slideshows' and then one large one since I am doing these for my new art website: https://sites.google.com/site/brendaclews/

For reasons I accept (if it's a team website the danger of images being accidentally deleted by any number of users is quite high), Google Sites does not allow you to delete images you've uploaded. So I'm going to host the images from Google's Picasa.

This painting is one of my favourites, and looks better 'in the painted flesh,' on my wall, than in the final image (perhaps I need to take a new photo of it), but I hope it imparts some joy to you.

There's a bunch of writing around it at the website on the main page.

Brenda's Art Website.

From Women In Spring - Brenda Clews

It's been a long time since I last painted, about a year and a half. Why did I give it up? I think I sacrificed my art for a relationship where it may have been problematic but now I realize not painting was the real problem. Still struggling with issues of creativity, in other words.

I don't mind the painting, quite like its bright colours, find the women a bit detached from one another, but then they are separate poses by the same model over the course of a few hours one evening at a lifedrawing session. If I did them again, I'd like to paint them with the wings of angels... and, who knows, may.

I realized that the figures have composed themselves into pairs - the two on the far right I don't particularly like - the colouring is too thick, but then again they're more earthy than the others, more ripely body, hence more sensual. The central two I rather like, somehow reminding me of the centuries of art looking out at me, it's hard to explain; one looks straight at us, I left the features of her face deliberately delicate, not forceful lines, and the other I happily left with her head in the clouds, almost sculptural, and she's quite androgynous too, sort of like 'The Thinker.' On the left are figures growing out of the swell of sky and earth, colours themselves. They remind me a little of Michelangelo's 'Slaves' who are both emerging from and yet still part of the marble, but my figures are free and lithesome, like flowers dancing in the breeze. There is one rising like a vivid plume, too, who echoes the far right one with the walking stick, herself a figure, in my mind, of the Australian walk-about medicine woman of earthy potent power, bald perhaps from illness she's gone through, but she's there, an onlooker, a protector, one who cares for the soul. All the figures are sensual to my eye. They blossomed on the page like flowers in a wild garden, nature spirits, fertile with the creativity of nature and spirit.

This little painting comes out of the womb of life, the women who are like flowers in the garden we all play in through our years of living.

Overall I'm pleased with this renewed effort to paint again. I have already bought a sheet of paper for the next one...

This is how to do it - to continually have something 'on the go,' bit by bit things get done, you just have to keep dabbling, keep reaching in, taking a moment here and there to add a line of paint, or a phrase, or a little prose poem, and then you find you have a book, or a set of paintings to show.

Inspiration is in the moment, in discreet, distilled moments of time.

I happily share my journey with you.

Tag at Flickr: Women In Spring - I wonder if it'll work?

Sketch of Sketches



It's really pale, I apologize. A pencil sketch of sketches from a lifedrawing session in, oh, Nov 06, that's how long it's been! Feeling like painting again...

(25.5" x 19"; 64.7cm x 48.2cm on textured ivory Strathmore Artist Paper)

Women In Spring, first wash of paint



Women In Spring, 2008, 24.5"x18", 62.2cmx45.7cm, oil wash on paper (click to enlarge)

In process... who knows. Not what I'd thought I'd do. Painting, like life, is like that.

Colours dart at me. Touch, and pull their washes back.

Can I shroud you in the colours of the background, so you'll fit your pattern, so you're not cut-out from it.

I'm not different from the scenery I surround myself with.

Look closely, there I am.

With my addiction
to you.

Dreaming Truth, detail



dreams are infallible, accurate, true for that situation, that relationship, things change, dreams reflect the changes; nothing expresses the truth of life like the dream; the dream is a clear representation of our reality;

the dream is a clear representation of our reality.

dreams never lie, the dream doesn't lie: it foresees and predicts, even forewarns
encapsulates; explains; never our enemy - nightmares are our fears, turn and face them

the dream conveys its messages in metaphorical language, images that shock, or bewilder, or uplift, that astound, are vivid, direct

dreams guide, our helpers: offering insight, mystical information, a panoramic perspective

ancient wisdom calls to us through our dreams, where our intuition is powerful
prescient

Dream Truth...



Painting Corner



How little space for painting! This is the corner. You can see the original sketches from which I composed the composite image of The Women in Spring. What's nice is that if I don't like the way the painting turns out, I can create another one. The painting on the board is influenced by the one on the wall, isn't it. I did that one in Vancouver and it's quite large: Celestial Dancers, 2004, oil on canvas, 4' x 5' based on late Medieval relief figures of the temple art of Cambodia when it was in the midst of a shift from Hinduism to Buddhism. The smaller one on the wall to the left is Celestial Dancer II (31"x35", acrylic on canvas, 2003) based on an image of the Hindu God, Krishna. This nook is about to become all desk as I move the futon couch out and create a workspace for painting and writing...

Women In Spring - finished!



Women In Spring, 2008, 24.5"x18", 62.2cmx45.7cm, oil wash on paper

It's relatively easy to swoosh paint, Zen-like, and let the image emerge however it does. Only now I sought to include detail, painted lines, to put effort into the composition. I wanted the women, who are one woman, drawings from one lifedrawing session placed on the same page, to be colourful like tulips in the garden. The figures appear in varying stages between perhaps more painterly and a reliance on drawing, and I don't seem able to move away from that, not yet anyway. I outlined boldly in paint tonight, resisting the urge to use coloured pencil, then wasn't sure, then knew that from across the room there would be more definition. The final criteria - can I live with them? Who knows?

The grouping; the way they create the space around them; their relation to each other; the view they allow the viewer; some emerging out of the washes of colour, or disappearing into...

The fecund forces of Spring, who can define it?