From Perigee Moon

Metamorphosis Under the Moon, 2010, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil pastel, oil paint pen on paper. Click image for larger.

Perigee Moon

Under the full moon,
she mutates.

Her arms, bone
twigs become wing feathers.

Red hair flaming in the white light.

A riptide of ocean
in our blood
pulls to the surface,
this night of imaginings.

Moonlight glosses the lake.

The white muse moon pours magic.

Under the full moon we see
in the dark, our dreaming eyes open.

Pastel on black paper, my fingers dance.

The women sculpt each other.

A creatrix is born.

She is a wild woman.
In the circle of wild women.
In the wilds, where we transform.

Among the night animals,
owl, wolf, jaguar,
where our breath roars,
whispers, sings,
where our visions
transform us.

Pastel sketch done in a DanceOurWayHome 'Dreaming in the Dark' session yesterday afternoon, January 30th. Poem written today. The perigee moon this year was very bright; we saw it under clear skies.

February 14th, update: Last night I wrote the poem on the pastel with a Sharpie paint pen that malfunctioned - splats! and so dipped the pen into deliberate splats on another sheet of paper and wrote the poem. Oddly, the words seem scratched on with a feather, perhaps dipped in a splat of white moonlight... :)

I travelled and came home to myself, listening to this profound album.


direct link: Moon Events

I'm guessing the last track is the later studio one... the energy shifts quite dramatically in 'Excavation Site in Sector E-4.' Yet, as with the previous three, which were created in an on-air improvisation jam session for an hour long streaming radio show, it builds its soundscape with fast sliding repetition inside long tonal waves until you are caught in the swell, part of the story, enthralled with the expedition, unable to leave until the song has ended. Mike Winchester's music is hypnotic (in track notes he is listed as composer). There is speed, excellence, command: we know where we've come from and where we're going, it's the journey that's exciting. It grips us. And what a journey! The astronaut metaphor of visiting and populating the moon in a futuristic excavation creating a 'Moon Train Station' works beautifully with this Berlin School inspired music. Within sameness, and progression, come profound insights, enlightenments. I felt comforted listening. In the peace of dynamic opposites. 'Images of Light and Dark.' Unions. In the final piece, though seeming a departure from the earlier three, the music entirely stops perhaps half way through. Silence. What are we to do with this? Has the album ended? Is there an anomaly in the moonscape? But no, the silence is music. It all comes to rest. Sound gathers in its silence. That silence, like through a glass darkly, reveals what I consider a brilliant album that I will listen to again and again as I discover more deeply who I am by listening. Thank you WMRI.

The landscape, a white squall while I walk through it. Snow thick as confetti. The Ice Queen married her King and the atmosphere swirled in celebration. My eyelids sting with windburn as their chariot rises into the north wind. After I found the street again it seemed the landscape between the hills had been shaken like a snow globe. Blue, blue sky, sunny, no wind.

From Midnight Sun: Wind Over Grass, 28" x 22", 71cm x 56cm, oil on canvas, 2010.

A painting depicting contact dance - which is... out of the dance studio, for sure, and into the dreamtime! And a solar eclipse, which reminds me of the black light, the midnight sun of the mystics.

When the river runs in bands, water ribbons her arm. Or she dances on rocks across. Those who support uphold everything in the underpainting. What is there to say of wheat fields or grass curling flames? Under the midnight sun strange dreams dance with intent.


This painting took 20 days to complete, from Jan 5th to 25th. Though I did initially work from an old sketch, I discarded it. The images developed, like in a dream, of their own volition organically. The figures and landscape are imaginal. It's finished, even if in 6 months when the oil paint is dry, I add a few details.

From Wind Over Grass, a painting (click for larger)

Wind Over Grass, 28"x22", 71x56cm, oil paint on acrylic black base, 2010, blocking shape and colour - solar eclipse added. Photographed indoors in window light, no flash.

I've created a new YouTube channel design for my site there: http://www.youtube.com/user/brendaclews. The background image is from Hubble. It is the spectacular photograph of the birth of stars in a star nursery.

From Device Daily:
According to experts, this group of stars is called the R136, which is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula. This Nebula is a “turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.” The 30 Doradus Nebula is the largest and most prolific star-forming region in our galaxy.

Many of what we see as diamond-like icy blue stars are massive constellations that can only be seen in the 30 Doradus Nebula since it is the only nebula that can house such amazingly large group of stars. These “hefty stars,” are believed to transform as supernovas in the coming years.

This shot of the R136 were taken between October 20th and 27th 2009 by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. The blue lights are from the hottest and biggest stars, the green lights are from oxygen and the red lights are from hydrogen."

Sax like a trail of seafoam as the voice murmurs, clearer less clear, between realities...

The voice, almost inaudible at times, murmuring, just under the waves, rises up and pulls back, almost taking me to what is between worlds. The words murmur all around me. They become distinct, then disappear into the sweetness of the sax, a sax become like a deep calling home. This morning I read a poem, 'Talking to Ourselves,' to which Orchestra Sekra's 'The next life' seems a perfect accompaniment, and as I read and listened, yes, our thoughts are often in that place between worlds, following our loved ones into the ocean wake, waking on the shore, with and without them, carrying on with our lives:


Talking to Ourselves

by Philip Schultz

A woman in my doctor's office last week
couldn't stop talking about Niagara Falls,
the difference between dog and deer ticks,
how her oldest boy, killed in Iraq, would lie
with her at night in the summer grass, singing
Puccini. Her eyes looked at me but saw only
the saffron swirls of the quivering heavens.

Yesterday, Mr. Miller, our tidy neighbor,
stopped under our lopsided maple to explain
how his wife of sixty years died last month
of Alzheimer's. I stood there, listening to
his longing reach across the darkness with
each bruised breath of his eloquent singing.

This morning my five-year-old asked himself
why he'd come into the kitchen. I understood
he was thinking out loud, personifying himself,
but the intimacy of his small voice was surprising.

When my father's vending business was failing,
he'd talk to himself while driving, his lips
silently moving, his black eyes deliquescent.
He didn't care that I was there, listening,
what he was saying was too important.

"Too important," I hear myself saying
in the kitchen, putting the dishes away,
and my wife looks up from her reading
and asks, "What's that you said?"

"Talking to Ourselves" by Philip Schultz, from Failure. © Harcourt, 2007. Reprinted with permission.

_
with thanks to Balthaz for recommending this single

This album was recommended to you by:
brendaclews

It's not that I'm absent. I'm always here. There's so much I cannot speak of. Before it was different, I was able to weave things into prosepoetry that obscured while clarifying, you know how that is.

I am doing things I want to be doing, though. Today I had my second hour editing a manuscript. I have to go to a coffee shop, be trapped with nothing else to do; it works. On this mms I give myself until the end of June, that should be amble time.

At night I spend a minimum of an hour painting. To do that has its odd requirements too, but I am able to settle myself enough to enter the paint.

There is duress. Energy, focus, not easy. Yet I am doing it - with a few tricks. Since I know myself so well I know what'll motivate and what won't.

We are our last mysteries, aren't we. Though after many years of living as who we are, we become accustomed to ourselves, and our idiosyncracies. We learn how to negotiate our devious psychic terrains, how to point ourselves in a direction, how to stay on track.

_
Wind Over Grass, 28"x22", 71x56cm, 2010, blocking shape and  colour. Photographed at night with flash, two photos merged to make it appear as it is (so far - still far to go).

Visit Backing Jamendo

Jamendo is community, Ai!R is right. I'd like to remain part of this beautiful community of music lovers and keep sharing our discoveries, keep sharing our music. Jamendo is not, and most likely never would be, a money-making venture. But the musical discoveries are awesome. I listen everyday to artists who've uploaded to Jamendo. Sometimes I pair songs with my prosepoem readings. I can't imagine life without this community. If we can't save Jamendo, which might be gone by the end of February without financial backers, let's save our community. Where the heart is. Our love.