It's my birthday, and I won't tell you how old I am, but I did get this video finished finally. The last step was subtitling it, and got that done by 11pm. I worked long and hard on this video of a performance I did at Urban Gallery on January 30th, and hope you take away something of the sadness and outrage over the Gulf Oil Spill and what we are doing to our world even as we have to continue loving in an increasingly polluted world...


direct link: Ink Ocean

Brenda Clews performs her poem, Ink Ocean, live at Urban Gallery in Toronto during a Performance Poetry Salon she organized there during her Poempaintings show in 2014. http://brendaclews.com; http://urbangallery.ca

John Oughton plays his electric guitar with his magic box of sounds: http://library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/oughton/index.htm

All the extra clips (except for the drawing, see below) are from public domain video and photographs of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill in 2010.

'Ink Ocean' is about the oil spill that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 when nearly 5 million barrels, or 210 million gallons, of crude oil were spilled into the sea due to an explosion of an off-shore drilling rig. It remains the largest marine spill in the history of the petroleum industry.

Over 5 months, hydro-carbon eating bacteria devoured 200,000 tons of oil and natural gas in the Gulf, and then stopped. Despite the massive cleaning efforts by the oil industry and governments, and the efforts of the bacteria, as of 2012, 40% of the spill remains in the waters.

This prose poem began as writing in an ink drawing (included in the video, the actual drawing is pictured in the credits). It took 6 - 8 months to finish, and was revised in preparation for a reading in 2012. It is an experimental poem structurally. A poem of utterance, of cross-currents and paradoxes. It is composed of different voices, and perspective shifts. The crude oil spilling in the ocean forms words. The poem arose out of a drawing in black ink, an ink that became a central shifting, drifting, writing, spilling, seeping metaphor in the poem on the oil spill.

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For those fun sun lovers who go south each winter, some photos: our beach; our beach with what-appears-to-be a swarm of fireflies; and a selfie in a beach cover-up that keeps all the uv rays off - if I appear a little bright-eyed it's because I took the Ray-Bans off and am blinking in the flood of sunlight. The dog also has a special beach cover-up in the first photo that protects her against harmful uv rays. You can't be too careful on the beach!



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Tomorrow is the LAST DAY of my show at Urban Gallery and we are ending it with a kick-ass Poetry Salon, Poet Painter Beggar Thief, featuring five poet painters: Luciano Iacobelli, Nik Beat, Norman Bethune, Jennifer Hosein and moi. Jennifer is kindly hosting the salon. Her poster is uber cool.


I'll be reading from my Suite of Botticelli Venus Poems, and the first poem is about the scent of magnolias (flower sacred to Venus) on my tongue...



I wonder if this test recording will work? Sorry, if I remove the post because it doesn't.

Ok, it's the craziest little thing, but I'll leave it. I was testing out something for, ahem, future 'real' recordings. Lol!

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Rising to the surface for a bit. Hi everyone! How're y'all doing?

I'm still working on the video. There are very minor things that no-one else will notice and I may just leave - there wasn't enough light in the gallery and so when I boosted the light in the editing process I also gained grain and a loss of clarity - after adding a filter to remove some of the noise, it has taken about 3 days to render the video! Enough is enough. Any other changes will have to be done to a master file. Also, I think the sound needs to be entirely re-done. But is that because I am not just immersed in the editing of this performance piece but drowning in it? Lol. I hope it's ready before the last day of my show at Urban Gallery on Saturday!
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'Find darkness; bring it in. Find light; bring it in. IN.' -from Ink Ocean.

Some digital magic from the videopoem I am working on. On screen for maybe 12 seconds including dissolves in and out. This videopoem is like that. Will have to decrease it in size and fade it out somewhat, or destroy it even more than that in the final version of the video, but I thought I'd show you its present state. It's a 're-working' of my ink drawing, Ink Ocean (from which the poem arose).

The image (and it's got a little animation too) is such a complex construction that I have saved it as a separate project and am going to make a .mov file out of it and insert that back in to the main timeline. That way I can decrease its size and fade it out as a whole.

Here is the compound clip over the main timeline a little later - it changes in colour, as well as being a little bit animated:


In the process of making this post, I decided to uploaded the clip, all 12 seconds of it! Some of it actually changes colour throughout the sequence when it is part of the main timeline, as in the image above.



The original drawing, which does appear in different manifestations in the videopoem:

Getting there, slowly... perhaps 75% done, it's hard to say ...tissues still piling up beside me -good news is it's not bronchial  because I can breathe deeply with no crackly sounds (I will visit the doc in another week or so if it doesn't let up).

The video editing timeline, as you can see, is becoming more complex, and I have made a few compound clips already. Actually, what I'm doing is a complete 'no no' in the more academic videopoetry circles because I'm illustrating. It's like I'm captioning with images - except it takes a lot longer than adding text and is if-y the whole while. Speaking of captions, I still have to subtitle, which [groan] is gonna take time too.

Good thing I'm still under with the post-flu blues. Wouldn't have the patience for this level of detail otherwise. [Bright side look.]

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The mild fever and sinus headache, after 5 straight days, dissolved away yesterday. I am at the stage that is the last hurrah at the end of a bug run after which it should clear up but it might turn and dig in and descend into the bronchial passages. Since I am prone to bronchitis, I am still taking it easy. I do hope it is almost done its course and the appropriately created antibodies are now part of the inner army.

With boxes of tissues beside me, I've continued editing the video of the performance I did of Ink Ocean at Urban Gallery on Jan 29th. It's, well, you will have to wait.

Here's a teaser - a snapshot of a moment that is only a few actual seconds in the videopoem but an interesting image never-the-less.



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Still around, still lots of photographs to crop, brighten a bit, and post. Had a bout of the flu (a-chu!) that seems to be hanging on. Hope everyone's doing well, and I'll be back, yes, yes.

Working on a video - first in well over a year or longer ...but then, being sick keeps you in one spot restin' - only who can do nothing all day long? So far, I have 70 video clips to add to my video - days of research and now we'll see how my sensibility and aesthetic craft this performance piece. Doing it, I realize that I really do have a 'style' that is quite unique and it seems that that sensibility and aesthetic continue to build on my 'style' and develop it. I really don't see videos like mine anywhere - probably because I use a tripod, do a performance, and work on the presentation as a visual artist creating a painting. I do it as a flat piece, without dips and dives, camera angles, scene changes, or any glitz at all. The style of my video oeuvre is a throw-back to the early days of cinema when there were no camera angles, no in-the-scene action shots. My performance poetry videos show the stage, the way cell phone vids of concerts do, but I work to make a different sort of magic in them. I like to let the poetry speak for itself, as it would if you were in the actual audience. Real film people of course don't like my video poems. They are considered boring, I suppose. But I don't think film students and practitioners are who my audience is, or the one I'm aiming for. Even without the support of the video/film/poetry community, I do quite well. I like to think it is because I am very clear on what I am doing and who I am doing it for and all I can say is I am actually quite happy with the success of my work (in relative terms - videopoetry is the least watched genre on YouTube - 200 views in a year is a successful videopoem, really, and my serious videopoems do much better than that).

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Split Mask painting (for sale) and me in my handmade Split Mask at Urban Gallery where I had performed my poem, Split Mask, on January 29, 2014.

Original photo by Josef Hochleitner (see below), and then I spent hours photoshopping it to bring all the masks out of the shadows since it was a night time indoor shot.


Because I thought you might be curious, here is the wonderful photograph by Josef that I started with. He took it with his Canon EOS 5D Mark II and a flash at night and indoors. You can see in my final photograph the colour corrections I did, and how I highlighted the masks themselves (all closer to the original on the wall currently at Urban Gallery).
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Tons of photos, some video, and drawings to post from recent events I've organized at Urban Gallery to promote my Poempaintings show, but fatigued, been far too busy. A short note to say you will soon be inundated.

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