The House Plant, 21cm x  29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, oils, India and watercolour inks.

A meditation in ink on the plant, which withdraws its essence into its own mystery even as it offers its vibrancy. The brush wet with ink, you only have one chance. Lift the brush, glide it on the paper.

This plant is on my dining room table. I painted it in my Moleskine this morning. Yes, maybe I am trying to speed up.

I'm thinking to leave this, and go on trying to fill up my Moleskine... I started it last February! And only a dozen paintings so far out of a hundred pages? Later I can come back to finish pieces. Like leaving a rough draft of a poem for awhile before polishing it, it is often better to give some time to the process of creating a painting.

I used a little Sony Cybershot bought in 2007 to take this photo, and I think I need to figure out the white balance since the paper is a whitish cream colour, not the tone here.

Okay, why am I painting pretty little pictures like this anyhow? I'm trying to go backwards to go forwards. To re-find something in my art that was lost a long time ago. This painting tells me I've found it. Because of that, I may leave it essentially alone when I finish it. Tighten it up, rather than cover it with a scrawl of lines. I'm not attempting realism in any way. It's another quest altogether. Working on the drawings and paintings in this sketchbook is taking me to deep, interior places, and already as I turn the pages, looking at them, they describe my journey there.

A thought on why art is so difficult to define:

If art-making is essentially 'right brain,' 'intuitive,' meaning not of the discursive, logical sides of our minds, then it can never be explained in the language of scientific verification, can it. I think the best art criticism attempts to bridge the chasm. But nothing in the 'discursive' world can explain art, let alone art-making, or predict its occurrence. You might as well talk about shivers if you want to talk about art, as Emily Dickinson did. If you get goosebumps, or are breathless, or feel threatened, or have a sense of awe, if you melt looking at a painting, then, yes, very likely you are before a work of art that is transforming you.

I have created an album for my Moleskine drawings. They are quite diverse in their styles I think. Some of them I like; others need more work. I put a detail of one of my favourites first, because that's for show, but then they appear in the order in which they were created, which is not always the order of the pages...

If you click on any of the thumbnails, a lightbox will appear, with all the images in a row on the bottom -click on the next one to make it large, and then you don't have to move your mouse from that position, just keep clicking and you'll go through all the images at screen size. I like the lightbox because the background is black. Embedded below the table I created for the thumbnails is a slideshow, with the captions (the little captions icon in the bottom left of the slideshow window is a toggle switch, click on the playbar and then on it to make them disappear).

I'm not very far into the Mole, and it is my project for the year. Expect a video when the sketchbook is finished!

While I never make New Year's resolutions, this little summary appeared under my fingers... do you ever look back to the last new year to see if you accomplished your aims...?

Here goes:

Most of my current, and only, Moleskine folio sketchbook drawings and paintings are collected on my Green Fire webpage. They are all from 2011. At the rate I'm going, it'll be years before I finish the Mole.

During the coming year, I hope to make good headway on filling my Moleskine up with artwork that comes from deep within me.

Before me I have a fairly large canvas, 30" x 40", on which I would like to do a self-portrait. In March I turn 60, and that feels very significant.

I've been working on a 22 minute triptych of poems in a video for 6 months, and sure hope I finish that project to my satisfaction in 2012.

I have five videopoetry projects planned for 2012, and they are important to me, and, hopefully, in 12 months I will be on the other end of their production.

In 2011 I created an on-line journal, VidPoFilm, that focuses on the poetics of a new art form, the video or film poem, and I've written 11 articles for it so far. I hope to begin receiving submissions for articles and see the site start to develop the breadth I wish for it in 2012.

In 2012, I would like to start sending my work out to journals and publishers, something I have not done ever, not seriously (though I have been published here and there, in a few books, some poems and artwork in academic journals, etc.).

In February I hope to start posting my last NaNoWriMo novella in a private blog, which will constitute the first edit. I have a small list of half a dozen people who have asked to read it, so I will let that be my impetus.

I would like to learn how to compose music out of found sound and with the various instruments and loops in Garage Band, but that may not happen.

I hope 2012 finds my plans for a home business coming to fruition in all the ways I hope it will.

There, a quick list of resolutions that I didn't know I had waiting to be outlined.

Wishing you all a great 2012!




The set-up for a self-portrait painting. The still-wrapped canvas, 30" x 40", is on the right; a mirror on the left. I took this photo with Camera+ on an iPhone 4, and used some of the effects the app offers (no, my ceiling is not mouldy grey-it's actually white. Yes it is.). How many months will the painting take? Oy, who knows....

Bountiful Garden

A video New Year's wish for you. That your year is...

... heaped with uncommon blessings, and filled with all life has to offer, and that you achieve what is important to you... a simple video card to honour the bountiful gardens we all are, with many good wishes embedded therein.

Wishing you the very best in 2012!

What began as a test in panning a painting became a New Year's video card! Simple, but sweet. And full of the bounty of the garden of delights. Garden chimes in the background. xoxoxoxo

In the Park in June, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2011, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, sized with Golden GAC-100, and painted with watercolour and India inks.

Notes on the painting:

A few layers of GAC-100 (artificial rabbit glue) on the paper prepares it for painting. I found the GAK gives you a little time to change your mind - you can dab the colour out before it sets permanently, so it is a little more forgiving than unsized paper which absorbs the colour instantly. It has a satin shine that is not like a varnish because it grabs the inks and sets them. It is faintly glossy, like brushed egg whites on cooked pastry, beneath the paint, which overlays it and is opaque. The GAK is not like a varnish because it is underneath the paint. It gives a luminescence to the painting that the camera does not quite capture.

I have no idea how you would varnish a piece like this. A matte finish would destroy that faintly glossy luminescence, and a satin finish would remove the deep opacity of the paint.

Which means, keep paintings like these in my book, or framed under glass. It is a fragile surface that I would not wish to intrude upon with a fixative.

A dimly wrought portrait of my daughter. Because I could not work with the paint for too long, I was not able to get a likeness. The woman in this painting is older than my daughter and does not really resemble her. Her energy is here, though.

direct link: Brandon Pitts: 'Puzzle Of Murders' book launch

This is a very good and very entertaining reading! I watched many times creating the video, and am still not bored! He's good, that Brandon man.

Brandon Pitts at his book launch for 'Puzzle of Murders,' published by Bookland Press, at the Toronto Public Library on November 6, 2011. Brandon was introduced by the publisher, Robert Morgan. http://brandonpitts.com

A video by Brenda Clews.

Notes on the video:

Editing this video, I came to enjoy the intermittent gritty, shaky, out-of-focus quality of the clip, and did not remove it; it provides texture to the reading. It helps to impart the sense of Geist (mind, spirit, or ghost), of the author, of the insane logic of the central character of Puzzle of Murders, of the murder mystery itself. It is as if ghosts and blood and memory swirl about. There is a bodily sense of the videographer in the fuzzy hand-held quality also, another Geist. That is the eye of the videographer, and it transmits a moving image to the audience viewing the scene. It is the eye of the world watching, or perhaps its ghosts. The view is not smooth, featureless, glossy, but cinematically uneven, rough. These imperfections in the video normally would be removed in editing. I resisted, then became accustomed to them, then began to understand that where the picture has a gritty motion is where the ocean of words seeps into the vessel of the reading from the novel. That's where the salt water enters with its briny catch of krill and seaweed and skeletal remains. The imperfections give texture to what is charming, beautiful. Beauty cannot approach us in its wholeness without its flaws, deformities, fragmentations. Slice-of-life, it's messy on the edges, it has its own reality. The book is full of slips and fissures, so is the video of the launch. I hope you enjoy what I have created from my video of the event.

I finished this video on Brandon's birthday, December 28th, 2011, a perfect birthday present for him.

The background clips are free stock footage from Vimeo: black ink; woman.

A mute shifting, like the slide from a light-dimmed sky
to darkness in the slanting rain. I am
wordless. The dead hover over me
as we commune.

When we are here, fully immersed, time unravels
properly. Otherwise
it knots.

Knots of not-enough time tighten. Tasks pile on tasks and
we forget the spirits
who wait for us:

To remember our remembering.

The falling rain sleets and turns to snow;
the boughs of the black trees glisten wetly
in the night.

Happy Holidays!

(The card is based on my brother's art work, rendered in black and white)

Dear friends,

...dear beautiful people in my life... you all mean so much to me, you cannot know.

...this year I thought I had nothing to share (art or poem or video), but, then, Shadow Cave is about reaching into the darkness in ourselves and bringing what is hidden in us to light, which is sort of like the return of the sun in the darkest moment.

It's a small offering, and perhaps too long to watch. Don't worry if you don't, I don't mind and I'll still love you. I did subtitle it, so click on the cc if you'd like to read along, or translate into another language.


direct link: Shadow Cave

It's based on a real ritual I did in 1995 and wrote an extensive entry in my journal about. I re-wrote the ritual as a sort of modern fairy tale. It's about integrating ourselves at our deepest levels, however we image that. Sometimes what is in our shadows is not anything 'sinful' at all! It's only what we've repressed in ourselves... which could be our recognizing how luminescent we really are!

Shadows and dopple gangers appear in this videopoem, as ever. :) Please forgive. (I just can't help being multiple, ya know!)

I offer it to the light within us.

On this Solstice, Festival of the Lights, and for the auspicious coming year, many blessings to you, wishes for good health, prosperity, good fortune in work, relationships, family, and the success of all your creative endeavours,

love, Brenda