for my son

It may or may not be finished, but feels as if it is. I'll call it a figurative abstract.

(click to enlarge)

This drawing sat on my desk, it's 55mm x 74mm, 300lb archive watercolour paper, on that piece of plywood, under tissue paper, since last Summer. Many things have rested on it, papers, purses, gloves, hat, scarf, sweaters, until I cleaned it all up a week ago. Yesterday afternoon I threw water all over it, which ran everywhere, on the floor, all over my class notes (requiring a 'drying out' on a towel in the living room) but never mind that, and started rubbing paint in.

The painting wasn't too bad, really it wasn't. But for no reason that I can think of I found a Waterman fountain pen that still had ink in it (oh, rue the day for pens with ink when you shouldn't!) and inked in the figures, after they'd had their first wash of paint. I only looked at the lines, was comforted in the process of outlining and ignored the whole painting in my act.

What a mess! Why'd I do that? Inking by rote, rather than with a sensitivity to the image?

Now I have to try to clean up- the inked lines far too dark and insensitive. Because I drew them after the first wash of colour, the colour doesn't adhere to them, nor did they bleed into that first wash as would normally happen (since I used to ink first, then paint).

Oooh, la!

Is this why it sat like an accuser on my desk for over 6 months saying, paint, paint, when I would choose the 'by rote' path rather than the 'in the moment' shifting and changing as light and colour asked, and be forced to confront my own predilections, my own habitual patterns, all the immovable grids in my perception?

Arghhhh.........

´ ¸.♥¨) ¸.♥*¨)
(¸.♥´ (¸.♥´ .? *¨* ¯¨*´¸
`*.¸.*´* .• *¨* ´¸ .`¯¨*•´
¨*• *´HAPPY CUPID DAY!!!!!¸
¨*• .*¨¸ ¤.¸ ´•.¸ * ´¤.¸ ¸.
.¸.*´¤ ¨.*• ¤.¸
¨* *.¸.*´*¸ .• *¨* ´¸ .`¯¨*•´
¨*• .´ *¸ .• •**”˜˜”*°•. ˜”*°•♥•°*”˜ .•°*”˜˜”*°•.
♥-:¦:-•*'''''*•-:¦:-•:*♥*:

Looks innocent. Yet this little 2 minute 'trailer' for my Digital Video Editing course took, well, an all-nighter and then some. First I spent many hours cutting it up into tiny 'best shots' sub-clips, 35 in all. Then I took some still photos of backgrounds to try. Then I started to put it all together. I think I got into bed at 6am for about 2 hours. And it wasn't finished.

In class last Monday, where we got an extension of 2 weeks, whew, I realized that what I was doing was a 'mini' version of the story, and that's not what's required in the 'trailer' assignment.

So, begin again... (or finish this and begin again)

Final Cut Pro (in class) and Express (what I work in at home) is drag and drop, and ooh la! I think trying to line up a snippet of a scene with the layers I like to work with and with dissolves in and out would take minutes rather than an hour if it were all done with a time line, with numbers. But I am told once I get used to the drag & drop interface that I'll find it very easy to work with. I haven't crossed that threshold yet, still being stuck somewhere on the learning curve like Sisyphus.

Melt into the edge of the room. Eyes shut; no-one can see me. Slide along walls, over chairs, until the table. Where I was going, I realize. Varnished wood, thick, old, probably Walnut. Carved in a carpenter's studio, perhaps. Legs spun on spindles. I imagine the tree who was stripped for the table, sawed into planks. Centuries old, sap running through limbs, leaves drinking rain and sun, rooted in earth. I hug the table, in the dark of my closed eyes. My chest to the tabletop, beating, then turning over, until my back lies flat. Reaching forward and down, from the safety of the wood, fingers groping air, the unknown. I cannot touch floor. It is the end of the world, the emptiness of the universe, nothingness. Only the wood holds me here.

The octaves. I am a child on a swing, flung out past the boundaries. My long-silenced throat clears, a tiny AUM. Louder. A simple scale, up and down.

I hope the others in the room, for we all move with our eyes shut, dancing our internal dramas, aren't irritated by my sudden child-like joy, the octaves.

I release the table, roll on the floor, light laugh,
humming.

Ai!R, Waxworks.

Comment I left: This music uplifts and takes me to places I haven't been before. It mirrors my experience. Gentle and majestic. The intimate and the massive vision of the panorama. Very Russian! Heaven in a grain of sand, or eternity in a wildflower [Blake]. You can feel your own pulse in Ai!R's music, and the expansion and contraction, the heartbeat of the galaxies. In this flowing jungle of orchestral electronic ambient alternative music. Beauty. Longing. Gracious love. Strong bonds of the heart, warmth.

Highly recommended! Kudos! You honour us, Ai!R, with your music! Thank you....

(I posted a link to this site last month, but it had only two tracks then, the entire album has since been added.)

Authentic Movement workshop this evening with Gennie, amazing expressive witnessing releasing deep painful joyful wisdom powerful.

Gennie was wonderful, witnessing, giving us her responses, the woman is a seer, a poet, she is. We got into some pretty deep stuff, some of us. Yeah - I sorta was rumbling by the last set! Authentic Movement is a beautiful process. I'm always amazed at how deep everyone can go with it.

It felt strange, for me, who is so private, to cry before others, and yet I did, and I was grateful for the 'river of life,' healing, survival, continuance, profoundly so for love, loving, and then out to torrential rains, wet-through by the time I reached home, and a fresh umbrella and a 2km dog walk, she in her leaking red nylon dogcoat, my boots leaking near the end when we came to the park, both of us waterlogged, the rivers pouring from the sky...

Post the little pastel I did after the middle set, which I won't get into, but, ahh. Well. I literally had to force myself to go to the workshop, held in my area, so close by, I've been cloistered and very withdrawn of late as I come to terms with everything that's happened.

The nearly four hours we spent together, the small group gathered, the facilitator, her perceptions, compassionate, non-judgmental, helped.

Horizon After Horizon of Singing Bowls

Bowl After Singing Bowl of Horizons, a prose poem of my life in sections, part scrapbook, part travelogue, an immigrant poem of the always arriving with its tracings of memories of the singing bowls of horizons traversed, maps a journey across continents...and is embedded in the following nineteen photomontages. The full poem is appended here.





flickr seems to do a better job of posting a slideshow of photos, it's just got limitations (of 200 photos max) on its free service that Yahoo introduced when it took over the company (flickr originally created by a small Vancouver company of 5 people, one of whom I met at a blogging conference there & talked with for about an hour). Picasa, while a great service with far more 'free' space (1GB), seems to muddle the appended text, in this case poems, by removing the formatting, whereas flickr leaves it in. And the flickr slideshow is definitely better- just image, sized to your screen, no finding what to click to render the text invisible and that you should only see if you want to look at the images individually.

I've added a link to the flickr slideshow of this autobiographical photopoem to my blogger sidebar.