A night where over a million people flood the downtown core all night long for art! From 7pm to 7am the Arts Community in Toronto is ON SHOW. A fabulous all-night event with everything you could imagine, art shows, installations, performances, readings of creative writing (poetry, novels, etc.). It is a wild and beautiful night. It's sponsored by ScotiaBank. Here's the main website: http://www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca/

The crowds who move from spectacular or intriguing or simple art exhibit to exhibit is mostly what I have experienced. This year, however, I am actually drawing at some venues - on Nuit Blanche, they are all free. They're 'rogue' events, not on the official roster, and not wanting to be part of the corporate culture that finances Nuit Blanche. (Keyhole at Twist Gallery on Queen St W., and Paris Black at Epique Lounge on Cumberland). But it's all fun; all intriguing. And an amazing production all in all, and a terrific boost each year for the art community in Toronto. If you're in Toronto, dress warmly tonight! And enjoy what the arts in this city have to offer!

Charcoal Poems, in-process, 2012, 5' x 5', willow charcoal, oils on double primed canvas.

Charcoal Poems, in-process-detail, Brenda Clews, 2012, 5' x 5', willow charcoal, oils on double primed canvas.

Sun shone into the living room, so the lighting was better than the photo I took last night. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get an evenly lit photo of the whole painting due to its angle, the size of my space, and so on. A part of me wants to leave it as part drawing, with lots of blank canvas, but we'll see what happens as I continue working on it.

Some notes as I responded to Facebook comments:

• These paintings are like writing. In the way that characters come to an author, I find myself getting to know the figures who have emerged and understanding what they are doing, what they are conveying, and how they are part of the visual imagination.

• The next painting will be stapled onto a stretcher - stapling to the back of an office divider doesn't work very well. Not only is the canvas a bit loose, but the divider tends to do what tall buildings do in high wind when I paint. It has a rhythm, literally. Also, it's too heavy to put on my studio easel, so I have to sit on the floor to work.

• While my mother's death is not an actual focus in this painting, yet painting is a way to work out one's feelings, which rise to the surface to be expressed and released... 

Last night, I added some orange, and then wavered off to sleep. My brother probably has already picked up my mother's ashes, and he trying to see if her niece in South Africa might be ok with spreading them there - my mother so loved her home country, and always missed it, and often said she would like to go back and die there. But we don't know if our idea is feasible, vis-a-vis shipping, or possible for her beloved niece. I think my mother's recent death came up in the Paul Celan quote I used. Paul Celan is a poet of death like no other.

In the painting, to the right of the woman (not visible in this detail), some lines from Paul Celan's, 'In Prague':

The half death,
suckled plump on our life,
lay ash-image-true all around us -

we too
went on drinking, soul-crossed, two daggers,
sewn onto heavenstones, wornblood-born

(With thanks to Pierre-Marie, Bent, Don, and Brandon [among many others] for comments which elicited these responses.)
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The madness continues. (See previous post for the fragment of a Paul Celan poem written on the left-hand side.)

A full shot from the greatest distance my living room allows; and a detail. Night-time, daylight bulbs. I'll likely keep working, maybe all night, why not, it's the weekend. :)

The Charcoal Paintings, in-process -a detail, 5' x 5', willow charcoal, oils, on double primed canvas.

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When you don't know where to begin, begin where you are.

The Charcoal Paintings, in-process, 5' x 5', willow charcoal on double primed canvas. (Photo taken at night with two daylight bulbs in clamp lamps.)


Some lines from Paul Celan's, 'In Prague':

The half death,
suckled plump on our life,
lay ash-image-true all around us -

we too
went on drinking, soul-crossed, two daggers,
sewn onto heavenstones, wornblood-born

___

Now I like Frank Stella as a person, - what I have heard of him in interviews (a recent Frank Stella interview with Eleanor Wachtel is brilliant), and his views as espoused in articles I've read over the years. His stripes paintings (what I knew as an art student), however, leave me on the cold side. They are certainly outstanding for their time. It's self-confident work, sure of itself. All the stripes are hand-painted (pencil lines but no tape) too. But do these works of Stella's inspire me, inspire the poetry in me? No, rather, these paintings remind me of good geometry, bordering on an Op Art. Fun, a little play with the way the eye reads its optical images.

Still not ready to write of this past week, her death, her cremation, the ways in which it was a blessing and the ways in which it was a trauma. But I've been thinking of this photo, and, piling through dusty photo albums on bookshelves and then in the basement, finally found it. Taken on Adderley Street in Cape Town. I was 23 months old.


 

I fed the birds out back this morning for my mother. With a half bread-bag of collected bread, it seemed a simple enough offering to one of the good memories. Keesha, my dog, was on a leash, and while she wanted to eat all the crusts, easily accepted being pulled away from the pile. Our kitten always accompanies us on the dog stops by riding on my shoulder, held gently but firmly under my hand, but she was only looking for whatever moves, people, squirrels, birds, falling leaves. Later I watched from the window as the pigeons came, feasted.

My mother died last Thursday, September 13th; the funeral is tomorrow, though it hardly that, she was 89, and outlived all of her siblings and friends, so we will only have an immediate family gathering around her casket before it goes into the crematory fires. I seem to have been in deep meditation since she passed away. It was a good death, coming as a release after years of gradual decline and being fully bedridden after her stroke 6 months ago. She passed away peacefully.


Florence Clews, 1923-2012
Christmas, 2011
Photo by Tara Clews

(Sept 18th. I am still too raw to write. Her funeral was this morning. 

My mother just died. 

I wrote this in a Facebook post at 12:28pm on my way to the nursing home where she had lived out her  last months of life.

She died before noon; I was the first family member that the nursing home was able to get in touch with. It was a 10 minute walk through beautiful Annex streets in Toronto. I met my younger brother, Allan, outside the nursing home, and we went in together.


10:41am The Next Day: When a loved one first passes away, there is a feeling of peace, the pain and suffering are gone, and my mother's death was the most peaceful I've seen, she was ready, and a sense of unreality, like they haven't really gone. As the cycles of grief begin their descent through the months ahead, there are painful moments of recognition that the loved one is gone, truly gone, and comforting moments when you still feel them close. Death is a beautiful mystery. She has returned to the Ground of Being. The last time I saw her alive, on Monday, she absolutely glowed, for an hour or so, her skin luminous, her eyes with such depth, she looked very beautiful. I carry this precious image in my heart.

Yesterday, the nursing home allowed us to keep her there for 7 hours after her passing. Family members congregated around her bed. We each mourned and cried and some of us kissed her and we sat talking in the room. This is unusual in our high tech world where death is covered immediately.

I am grateful for these hours in ways I cannot yet articulate.

It will be a very simple funeral, a cremation, with only immediate family early next week. I have become mother-less, but at this moment, it feels as if the whole universe has become my mother.

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(ps. I added this post to my blog a month after she died. It was too hard at the time. I also tried to publish the condolences below as a comment, but it exceeds Blogger's comment box word length. )