Women In Summer, Oil paint, watercolour pencils, India ink on Waterford watercolour paper, 72.5cm x 52cm, 28.5" x 20.5"

I've posted a slideshow of the process of this painting before, but that was a Flickr slideshow (that I could only get to run backwards, if readers at that time recall), and this is a Picasa one (which runs forward very nicely, thank you Picasa). Apparently I did not keep the larger originals when I uploaded the series to Flickr. What. Else. Is. New. Hours spent searching on various hard drives and finally downloading what I'd uploaded at Flickr, and then uploaded to Picasa with embedded copyright info in each photo for the new Art Website.

Via an inserted 'Google Spreadsheet' I can get comments at my new Google Site art & poetry site! Sweet!

From Women In Summer - the process of painting

direct link to the slideshow: Women In Summer

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

Creating a new art website. While it's just like the old one, it's not an easy task. I'm using a Google Sites Homepage, and its design seems for text-based rather than image-based websites. I tinker with html, of which I am only a rudimentary user. I re-do & upload photographs of paintings in Photoshop Elements until something approaching the original colour appears on-site, at least on my fabulous iMac screen- can't say for PCs, but you do only what you can do.

At least this website allows me to use textboxes (you all know how I love to write!), and to place whatever wherever.

Unfortunately, being hard-hit by the recession, I let my domain name lapse, thinking to move it eventually to Google, but some other company has snatched my name up and is using it as a portal to infernal advertising and no doubt is waiting for me to buy it back from them.

I don't care about it. Eventually no-one will click on it and they'll drop it and I can have it back again.

Never mind.

The old Tripod website is still up and a great site, but for an advertisement-based 'free' site, a 20MG limit, and I've reached it. Google's is 100MG. I'm giving myself a few months to transfer everything over, and add more work.

Anyway, enough blather, visit the constuction site here, but keep your hardhat on (images may come loose and fly). Enjoy!

Brenda's New (under construction) Art Website.

(screenshots using Apple's
"Grab" application)


I like the look, it's unique, or perhaps it's my strange aesthetic. Making a Google homepage site, though, is proving to be more difficult than any of the other web pages I've set up. It formats beautifully on my iMac, but the font is gone on a PC, and the page doesn't automatically format to fit a Netbook.

Also, because it's an application meant for a team website, once you upload an image you can never delete it, meaning you will run out of space quite quickly if you are setting up an art website.

Since I'm learning a lot, I'll continue. It may end up working out. Check it out and give me your honest feedback. Much appreciation...

xo

A solution to the image issue may be to upload the images to Picasa and embed the html at the Google sites homepage... I'll be uploading everything to Picasa anyway, for the slideshow option, and for glorious, delirious Cooliris.

(Google made images un-delete-able because these sites are often shared by a team & accidentally deleting images could be very problematic if you have a number of users. Which makes sense.)

Google Sites homepage: Art website

Am I writing? Sigh, I'm very good at avoiding and playing instead.

This image is silly, but I was messing with ideas for a background image for yet another website, which I probably won't develop. I'm looking for something that can do what I've done at Tripod, but which is more accessible (like a site Cooliris enabled).

This one's a Google homepage, which I'd like because then I can centrally locate it, but Google has set up the basic design, it seems, for a writing-based site, not for images.

Ah well, what's wasted time on the Internet River? Things flow on, and they flow on...

I can't decide if it's her naked joining Siamese twin doubling, no quadrupling, breasts, though we can't see the other two, that disturb or that she is lying on some very stiff grass or a miniature forest, while a river flows past her, with a forest in the background and fuzzed edges so that she, who cannot walk, who has no womb or legs and could only roll if both twins are synchronized, is the focus. She is a beautiful digitalized woman with headbands. She's been cut up and recomposed with her mirror image. She is the creation of an artist. She becomes representative of chubby, mammalian life-forms 'out there' -"in Nature." She's helpless, but looking at the viewer seductively. Does she know she's been digitally altered and that her green screen has dissolved into a scenic outdoor scene in which she is the only representative of human life? Is she mutated? Is she dreaming herself in a totally weird Surreal dream of the 'commercialized woman' life?

This is an image created by the wild, humorous, brilliant multi-media artist Larry Carlson.

His art sets the imagination aflame. Does it for you?

Here she is again, cloned in the strange world of mutated images that are the hallmark of Carlson's art. Carlson has been famously described as the 'Salvadore Dali' of this century.



He calls this one, "The Garment of Al Shaddai." I found this: "Shaddai is one of the ten divine names quoted in the rabbinical legend of the angelic hierarchies. The essence influences the sphere of the moon: it causes increase and decrease and rules the jinn and protecting spirits."

Let your imagination wander in the fractal nautilus, around the Moon Goddess of eyes, the 'jinns' of the cloned mutated woman, the golden Ram and what is possibly a Lammasu, an Assyrian Sphinx, molecules that look like the grapes of the wild Dionysus, a red parrot that rests on a blue arm flung illogically out back of the 'Moon Goddess of Eyes' (is she perhaps a Hindu goddess too), the ground a pastel kaleidoscopic 'light table.' It is a world of the inner imagination, dream imagery, arcane symbols and hallucinatory visions. Carlson's work is 'psychedelic': "an English term coined from the Greek words for "soul," ψυχή (psyche), and "manifest," δήλος (delos)."

The soul manifest,
this is the garment of Al Shaddai.

Now this is piercing! The art of the dancing face.

I found this photograph of a pierced woman at Holy Caw, a blog of a fellow, Guy Kawasaki, in Edinburgh.

I can imagine the jingling every time she turns her face, but not what it must feel like to have a face of jewelry. Or what the silver feels like in the skin in very cold or hot weather. You'd have to love attention, because you'd be noticed wherever you went.

Something tender about this image, the self-mutilation that's body art and a fashion statement in its own way.

Cleaning the skin and the piercings must be a ritual in itself.

She has a beautiful smile.

A face of charms.

Sigh, okay, playing just a little...

View out my bedroom window, with a little license.

(Droll, dull, yah but black & white is fun.)

(Neva mind the parkin' lot, yo hear?! It neva has more'n two cars in it, and it gives me open space, a view of the sky, way better'n facing a house of windows facing you. In my opinion.)

I am very lucky to have a little apartment in my favourite area of Toronto. In the Summer the 200 year old trees really are magnificent, and many of the houses date back a century.

There hasn't been a day since I moved here that I haven't woken up grateful.


(click on image for larger size)

To commemorate Earth Day, I took this photograph for the flickr Earth Mosaic 2009 - the street that I live on. Nothing special about the photo, but it is home.

(click on image for larger size)

Hours of Thelonious Monk, on earphones, close, intimate, syncopated piano, no-one plays piano like him, trombone, the eroticism of jazz, drums, beat of skins, hours and hours, immersed, deeply, his discography, and I find him unlocking my heart and taking me through the labyrinth of my feelings.

And I remember you. You are there in every note. You are the sensual rhythm. You are at the centre of my heart.

Love.

✵

Thelonious, and wonder why I only came to him now, but realize I have been arriving all my life.

His idiosyncratic complexity particularly appeals to me.

≈
sensuous complicated smooth syncopated improvised rhythms he plays as I like to dance without prediction knots and whorls flow and collapse sweeps passions trills the sweet edge of sex lush dark entering each other over and over passages long lingering ecstasies and sorrows

☯

Monk plays with sensitivity, feels every pulse, nuance of the music of his band, the rhythm of the piece being played, his pianistic response always changing, the room, the audience, the air, the touch of the keys under his fingerprints, the pedal under his toes, his whole body an instrument for the piano, notes, even when in a collection it seems to me notes rather than chords, responding, resonating moment by moment, an inner music singing inside the outer tune, sometimes stopping and standing while the other musicians continue to play, then resuming, but not where he left off, we are at another eddy, another turn, trill, witnessing our journey through his journey of the music of the song.

☯

Monk's extraordinary piano playing has brought me back to the clarity of my heart, exploring the labyrinth of my feelings through many hours of his Riverview recordings.

Monk's syncopated improvisational style is well-known, yet listening to his earlier discography, in the range of 184 songs or so, on a Nano iPod and great earphones, Bang & Olufson, is never boring, it's like traveling a long river to the ocean, the journey through his life of music remains exciting, vital, near.

I cannot say how this music speaks to me - it doesn't speak to me, it speaks with me.

It lets me sing my song even as I rhapsodize through the delicate and complex notes Monk plays.

Gratitude.




Thelonious Sphere Monk, Monk's Blues (1968)




YouTube URL: Thelonious Monk, 'Round About Midnight.'