'The Woman Who Is Not Quite Effaced,' 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, graphite, acrylic, gel pen.

You might recognize the underlying sketch, which I never liked, and which I always intended to sweep paint over.

Yes, I am at a rather difficult juncture, where someone seems intent on effacing references to me and who ignores my best work, which has had an effect on not just me but other people who have noticed this exclusion, and so I was not able to participate in a writing group this January and have had to suspend posting my articles at VidPoFilm.

I am in discussion over the problems with a number of people, all of whom recommend suspending my articles until what to do becomes clearer.

This painting expresses, what do I call it, that attempt at effacement, but also that it will not work.

Tulips and Daffodils 3, 16" x 20", oils, acrylic ink on canvas.

When I came home last night and looked at this painting drying on the wall, I thought it 'too dark.' This morning I rubbed out a lot of the colour in the background, added some definition to the daffodils, some white ink lines to the the background energies.

The flowers were a gift last weekend, and I followed a hankering to paint them (by buying stretched canvases and covering my dining room table in plastic sheeting)- this is my third, and likely final, painting of the vase of beauties.

Tulips and Daffodils 3, 16" x 20", oils on canvas.

Wish I'd taken a photo of the underlying sketch because I liked it. This painting works, I know it does. But it is not 'neat' or 'tidy' or very well contained. It is on the edge of oblivion. A floral swan song. The flowers are dying, the flowers are dying...

...magnificently.

The drive to abstraction is causing emotional distress (you should be glad you didn't see), but every attempt I make to bring the flowers to my usual dance between drawing and painting results in a decrease of energy on the canvas, and so I must respect the muse, and let the musa sing...

Wishing you,
yeah, a day of LOVE,
pure, trusting, unjaundiced,
authentic, free, catchy-in-
your-bootstraps love, like go
make ART

Tulips and Daffodils 2, 2012, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", India inks, oils, Moleskine folio Sketchbook.

My second portrait of the flowers, done yesterday. In my Mole. I had a rough internal day, and this little painting took far longer than it looks like it did. I rubbed out and re-did the vase many times, for instance, as well as the background. The India ink would not adhere to the wet oil paint, either, and thus I struggled through the hours. In the end, it didn't seem worth the effort. Some days are like that.

(I do laugh, though. If you know anything of my green fire, chthonic rhizome garden goddess, you might see her here. Entirely unintentional - but garden goddesses who are molecular frenzies, chlorophyll arias, are like that - one arm bent behind her hourglass figure in a blue strapless dress, her bosom bursting green stalks,  yellow daffodils and red tulips, no head, but you can't have everything... lol)

On the table, today, the tulips are fully opened and on the edge of wilting, their moment of glory passing, the daffodils are still singing, their stems  plunged in the vase of water, and I'm hankering to paint them all again. I think I'm ready to make the transition from working solely in my Moleskine Sketchbook to canvas. On the phone this morning checking canvas prices, wow, quite a range! A 16"x20" regular stretched and primed canvas sells for $7.-$12.00! Then I found an art store way downtown that had a 5-pack deal for $22.00. It meant a 6km hike, a huge shoulder bag, and my dog, with my badly sprained wrist, a bit fearful, but I couldn't leave my woofy honey at home!

Though the trip took awhile, with a few other stops, I returned with the purchased canvases. By that time the light was disappearing, but I did manage a rough sketch on a canvas. So... maybe another painting before the flowers drop away. Maybe.

Tulips and Daffodils, 2012, 16" x 20", oil on canvas.

Yesterday I was given fresh flowers, and so I dashed over to the art store and bought a canvas and came home, set up my dining room table, and painted them.

My son really likes these flowers as they are, and so, despite the leaves losing that white scraped line from a distance, I am considering it finished. It is a painting for a small space, a kitchen or hall, meant to be looked at up close.

For me, the painting is about the two extravant, opulent tulips, each offering to bloom outside the canvas.

When I finish my current Moleskine Sketchbook, my intention is to purchase (somehow) 30 canvases and proceed to paint them.

Other than my self-portrait, these two aims (the Mole and the canvases) are my art projects for the year.

direct link: Tangled Garden

Tangled Garden is a triptych of nature poems (by me):

-A Floral Opera (2011)
-In the Hands of the Garden Gods (1979)
-Slipstream, the Tangled Garden (2006)

(with impromptu speaking between the poems, which each end with ~~~ in the subtitle track.)

Beautiful singing by the musician, Catherine Corelli from her album, Seraphic Tears (2010) (with her permission).

Note: This video is subtitled. Click on the CC on the play bar to activate or de-activate the subtitles. YouTube will also automatically translate the subtitles into 25 languages if English is not your main language and you would like to get the gist of the poetry.

Swoon (who is a brilliant filmmaker who makes video/filmpoems of other people's poetry [only once his own writing that I know of]. Click on the link to explore his ever-expanding repertoire.)

Brenda,
This is ambitious. Brave. I find it too long to digest is one take, but in smaller doses (altough maybe you didn't intent it to be taken in like that) I find it by times mesmerising. The colours and the shifting movements and all those layers do work. They take the piece to another level. I do see what 'body of work' (and hours) must have gone in this. That itself is something to bow for. That said, personally I find the piece as a whole leaning too much on the same techniques. That works for me, as said earlier, in smaller portions. But please don't notice these remarks, because in doing it like this you made a highly original piece, that, when drawn into it can take someone to another place intirely. But when not drawn into it, it feels like staring into some psychedelic lightfeature without the trip... In the end, I guess, it's about opening oneself up to it. That works, for me, only sometimes. But when it works...boy, it is a magnificent journey.
Best, M.

A torrent was unleashed in my response:

I thought poets and painters would have less trouble with this video than filmmakers. The single, long cut over 22 minutes would be anathema to a filmmaker.

Yet, and you well know I can create videos with many different cuts and visual action, why did I choose to produce a videopoem of one long cut?

This is a central question.

In my own answer, I find a rebellion against the fast, clippy, zappy commercial, though I do recognize that commercials are created by great filmmakers all over the world. But they are promoting products and need to be 'busy' to grab the viewers attention.

I have no such needs. I can make something that satisfies my deep inner needs. If you, or anyone else, finds it long and dull, that's not my problem. The video is exactly the way I want it to be. I am content.

As a long time meditator, focusing on one thing for great lengths of time is not an issue for me. A single clip slowed to 22 minutes is reaching into the meditative mind, the deep undercurrent of our consciousness.

You want to be busy, busy and run, run, and can't. You can turn the video off, or watch in palatable bites. But it won't speed up or become visually active. Tangled Garden is the opposite of a pinball machine. It is intentionally diametrically opposed to the bustling, busy life.

One can either take the sustained meditation, or they can't. I have added a few extras, the figure that appears and disappears in the second and third poems, the unmasking at the end. So there is movement, some pinball motion.

The main focus, and where there is movement is the vegetation of the background. This is the star of the film.

The earth.

All three poems are about the earth. Yes, I am a woman, as a woman I approach out of my own subjectivity. The earth is imaged as a strange mother. The earth gives us life and recycles us back into new life when we die. Nature is one huge mass of copulating organisms and plants, full of a sexual, creative energy I call the "green fire."

My muse the earth, the great earth mother, is imaged as a vegetative women, that figure is almost horrific, death become life, mulch of leaves and grasses and floral colours rising from the forest floor. A slow dance. Have you seen the Alexander McQueen dresses made of twigs, brome, leaves, flowers? I saw them after I had made this film and was delighted, amazed. I'll dig them up and show you on Facebook.

While McQueen's vision of an earth goddess is more like a Shakespearean sonnet, mine is more chthonic.

While it was entirely unconscious, with the paper mache mask I had made and the dance in High Park with my daughter nearby offering protection to the space I was moving and unlayering in a psychic sense to, and the editing, a process of pure magic, editing is always this, I was shocked to realize that the figure in Tangled Garden is the same figure that emerged in a dream (which the second poem is about) that I had 30 years ago!

These ruminations and thoughts and explorations of Nature that are expressed through the three long surreal poems in Tangled Garden have been with my all my life.

I lived in an African jungle until I was nearly 7, in Zambia in what was then the largest game park in Africa, beside the Zambesi River, 200 miles from the nearest town. We had a compound of mud huts.

So the jungle is very deep in me, and the video, despite being made in Canada in a city, contains the richness of the tangled gardens of my whole life.

It is a strange, surreal world that seems to be evoking intensities in people. Some seem to really love it and it has been called a 'magnum opus' - and it is, for me it is. And others, like you, have difficulty with it.

Yet the reasons you give, dear Swoon, and I do appreciate your struggling with this long art film, are ones I knew would be problemmatic to some while I was working on it, and yet, the meditative mind won out.

When you meditate long enough, the tangle of thoughts eventually stills and then you can hear the singing of the garden of the earth.

Thanks for your long and detailed comment - I think my work must strike a special key because when you respond it's with a mixture of yes and no, a complexity of diagonals and opposites that I appreciate.

Look at what I've written in response! You're evoking a response that is certainly of more depth than normal.

You are my teacher, and I continue to learn through our discussions.


Swoon

Brenda, Thanks for this explanation. And yes, as said before, it's good you did this exactly the way you felt it needed to be done. That is what makes it great (even if some, like me, find it hard to take in) I think that's what good art must be...a personal statement regardless of what 'others' might think about it.

So thanks. Thanks for sharing this. This work, these thoughts and this personal addendum.

Just keep exploring and doing exactly what and how you want to...

Best M.


This comment thread occurred February 8 - 10th, 2012, at Vimeo. Swoon's comments posted with his permission.

These are the Alexander McQueen dresses I was referring to in this comment thread.... aren't they beautiful. The flowers and foliage are real, and were apparently quite something to see since they were wilting, drying out, in the process of decay, and hence quite a fashion statement on the ephemerality of beauty...


                             

Self-Portrait Study 4, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, graphite.

'Nother one. The right side, from your view, is not too bad; not sure what happened to the other half. The nose is not too bad either. Pencil work like this is so delicate. I used a 2B technical pencil. Feeling closer to approaching the painting, though, and drawing on the canvas itself (my drawing has to be a good likeness even if I obscure it with layers of paint and various scratchings). This is my 4th study, done in the 7.5" distorted magnifying mirror that I bought at the dollar store yesterday. The light is daylight. Once again, too impatient to do the hair with its curls properly, though that would increase the likelihood of a better likeness.

This self-portrait in pencil took as long as it took to drink my first mug of coffee this morning. The Italian gold French-press coffee wasn't even cold when I'd finished (I do love my coffee). I am rather pleased with the drawing, after so many attempts to learn how to draw my aging self. I mean, I may look in the bathroom mirror in the mornings for 5 minutes, washing face, brushing teeth, applying tinted moisturizer and a touch of pencil grey eyeliner and some lip gloss. Who wants to look any longer than that?

The mirror distorts the face in a different way to the camera, so neither is perfect, but I am glad I persisted with using the mirror to draw from because at least the image I look at is breathing, looking, sipping coffee, and remembering to smile!

Self-Portrait Study 3, 21cm x 29cm, 8" x 11.5", 2012, Moleskine folio Sketchbook, graphite.

Just before shop closing I got the 'bright' idea to run out and try to find a magnified 'make-up' mirror, thinking my problem is that I can't see up close without readers (which I don't wear otherwise). I found a  7.5" diagonal mirror at the dollar store for $2.99! Distorted glass? -maybe. Then, on my way out with my dog, I stopped and thought, why not just try something quickly? Ha.

An hour later. The eyes resemble mine, but a bit big. Too lazy to do all those curls, indication suffices. After staring intently at the magnified mirror, and sketching what I saw, I ended up finishing my drawing holding the Moleskine sketchbook against my chest looking into a large mirror and drawing backhand what I saw reflected!

I've certainly got my desperate and perplexed look at how difficult doing damn drawing of myself is! I have a 30" x 40" canvas ready and waiting, but am trying to learn how to draw my aging face as we get acquainted again seemingly for new (since I haven't achieved a true likeness yet - resemblance, yes, yes, but....).

Onward, fearless artist(s!... :) :)

We traverse different versions of ourselves without a quizzical blink anyhow. Other people in real life never look quite like they do in photographs, and if you stand with them looking into a mirror, it's a whole other person again. I am always amazed by this - and yet, each 'image' is recognizably 'that person.' The real life person is three-dimensional, you almost never see anyone face-on like in a photo, but rather from various angles, and they are not cropped by the frames of the photo either, but full body in an environ. I find my reading of the curves and hollows and lights and shadows of a person's face is never anything like the camera's rendition, no matter what lighting or angles it captures. Some people are photogenic and look incredible in photos, while others who are beautiful don't photograph well, but mostly everyone kind of resembles themselves. The mirror image is always mind-blowing, though who can comment coherently on it? Stand at a bathroom mirror with your lover or family member or friend and see something of what they see and you'll understand what I mean. Truly, we are mysteries, not only to ourselves, but each other.

The body is unknowable. Our art, and photographs, and mirrors only offer approximations of who we are.

What was accomplished in January of my 2012 list:

-12 pages of my Moleskine Folio Sketchbook

-


-Tangled Garden, my longest and most ambitious videopoem to date. Tangled Garden encompasses a lifetime of reflection on Nature, natural processes, and our lives and deaths in the midst of those ongoing natural processes.



Some emails dealing with 'issues' - I retrieved a file from Podbean; successfully dealt with a nonsense Copyright Violation notice from YouTube. I wrote a review of Pierre-Marie Coedes Concerto No9; and wrote some VidPoFilm articles (though I have suspended all activity on that site until I determine how or even if I want to continue with the project).

It does not seem like much, but, in my own world, certainly a fruitful month. Traditionally February and August are my lowest months, so we'll see.

February has begun with an email to Jamendo that I hope successfully deals with a longstanding issue and which I will share soon, and some personal experiences and decisions that are very positive.