The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss, a long tantric poem I wrote a few years ago is now a webpage at my site - a webpage that took 15 hours to create! I didn't get to bed until 6am this morning, & then up again by 9:30am to continue... it's the clash of limited html skills & my aesthetic... the hunt through the night for html that would make appear exactly what I wanted... as the sun was coming up I gave up on my quest to find anything that would work for the poem given Google's coding limitations, and fell asleep for a few hours before getting up with an idea for how to circumvent my html illiteracies and created what I sought in trustworthy PhotoShop... and uploaded it as a .jpg already stitched to the website's background that it carries with it... because I wanted an underlayer of transparent darkness to offset the Buddhist robe kashaya safron colouring of the poem's lettering.

The webpage that you see now is delicately composed in a network of hidden tables...

... Which is actually one table with many cells, of all sizes and some of which appeared randomly & mysteriously without any purpose and wouldn't delete without taking the whole edifice with them - lucky for the 'undo' key!

Where spreadsheet meets esoteric spirituality!

In the webpage; in the webpage.



Just took 'a peek' at the 'View/Page Source'
and holy tantric goddess!

Now I know what creation is.

Computer code
the incantation of our time!

Mother of Milk, 2003 from Brenda Clews on Vimeo. (It takes 10-15sec to begin.)

I recorded this reading of "Mother of Milk" in my studio in Vancouver for ARM's 'Mothering, Religion and Spirituality' Conference.

Breastfeeding my two children until they weaned themselves, a total of five years, I went from filling my time with constant doing, a consumption of time, activities, ideas, to being able to be with the vast silence of the interior stillness. In this learning of a deeper rhythm which seemingly encompassed the discordant ambiguities, difficulties, discontinuities, traumas, and irreconcilable aspects, as well as the joys and unities, of my life my spiritual understandings and practices underwent a profound metamorphosis. While I would emphasize that there are many spiritual paths, and that all are equally valid, the particular path I found myself on arose directly out of my experiences as a mother-of-milk as I subsequently explored the concept of the ‘Divine Mother’ in ancient mythologies and modern religions, through meditation in a yoga tradition, and privately before my small alter at home, so that, while still emphatically a ‘woman in process,’ my experience of a feminist, goddess-oriented, empowering way of being could be be described as an ‘embodied spirituality.’

Videotaped in Vancouver, 2003
Copyright 2003 by Brenda Clews All Rights Reserved

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This is the DVD cover.






This was a personal essay, or perhaps prosepoem of a certain point of motherhood, and I recorded it in my studio in Vancouver (where I lived at the time) for a conference on "Motherhood and Spirituality" in 2003 in Toronto. The viewing was well received. Afterwards the CD went underground, and was in at least one art show, in 2004, at the Ayer Lofts Art Gallery in Massachusetts where it was one of the features of a video evening. Oh, and the prestigious Mothers Movement Online published it as an essay around that time too, and it's still online.

With my new iMac (ok it's almost a year old, but still feels "new":-) I found I was able to save this video as a .DIVX file, shortening it from the Quicktime 1.4GB .MOV file to 172MB .DIVX while not losing clarity in the smaller screen (as happened with the .MP4 file), and, even though it's 21 minutes long, was able to upload it, not to YouTube (which has a 10 minute maximum) but to Vimeo (which has no limit on the length of a video, only a size limit of 500MGs a week).

Because of Google Sites html limitations I can only embed a teeny tiny flash player that plays the reading at my new Art & Writings Website, it's real cute!

It's only taken me 10 years to do this! A slideshow. Large enough to see. A page at my Art & Writings Website. Even a price sticker. The option to order art prints is always available and preferable.


(Click on the slideshow anywhere to go to Picasa and view a 'larger show.' If you have Cooliris installed, then of course you can view at fullscreen.)

From Brenda Clews, Birth Paintings 1987-1989

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Direct Link: Birth Paintings, 1987-1989

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.