2009, 11"x9¼", 28cmx23.5cm, 
inks, oil pastel on archival paper
(I wrote into the drawing as I was
drawing; later I edited the words 
slightly into the poem that
accompanies the image)
throw bones

bone men
char men

cartilage has no
nerve endings

Baghdad is burning
-the bombers are coming-
hide your children

the god of fire thunder is upon us
the god who eats men

armor yourselves for it is useless
shrapnel sharp spinning
from the god's eye

cease & desist
cease & desist
cease & desist


                                                

A wee bit of humor today! ☆lol ♥♪

(click for larger size - it'll open even if the image is strangely absent from this page ;;)))

                                                

* The simplicity of this electronic music with its white spaces is conducive to my inner poetic thoughts. It's not shifting my brainwaves so much as moving with them. How this is I cannot explain. Is this ambient background music or muse to create by? A bicycle pump & air? Too wild for words. And yet it's gentle, opening pathways rather than probing; allowing a strange rhythm rather than imposing one. I like! I like!

Jean Toba writes in his album notes:


                                                

I am happier with this painting now. In it I see elements from different fairy and mythic tales, but she is Daphne. She is composed from my imagination.

Steven said, 'I have only been able to give the picture a quick look.  But I enjoyed a strange chilliness – not in a sense of anything emotionally frigid, but something wintery, something gelid, something in the tree branches that suggested icicles.  And I loved the eyes.  Two such different eyes to have on one face, and both so full of personality.  And the way the tilt of the eyes was taken up by the mouth.'

Yes, I felt Persephone, the onset of Winter, as I was drawing her!
_

Here is a little slideshow of the stages of the poem painting (click to go to Picasa for a larger viewing):

In this drawing I am trying to find something lost. A perception; a route; a way of understanding. From my book of doodle drawings, where I allow myself more freedom, less restraint. A poesis drawing - word painting.

'You are the TV'

Or this one I Photoshopped below - the caption could be:

I'm changing your channel to CONTINUOUS VISIONARY ENLIGHTENMENT!

Yeah!




                                                

These beautiful figurines were sculpted 7000 years ago!
Stunning.

The 'Thinker' and Female Figurine. Fired Clay, Hamangia, Cernavodă, 5000-4600 BC. National History Museum of Romania, Bucharest: 15906, 15907. Photo: Marius Amarie.

From a NYTimes slideshow, Artifacts from Old Europe, included in an article entitled, 'A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity,' by John Noble Wilford.

This is what awaited me this morning after the painting in the night that I put whitewash all over and then rubbed out. I can't say which I prefer, though I am tempted to go over to the art store and buy a canvas and paint a larger version of last night's colorful rendition while the energy is still hot.

This painting is part of my landscape as figure, or figure as landscape series, which I will upload to my life drawing page soon.

In my last painting I had returned to the style I developed in high school. Before the Fine Arts degree, before the style that developed through the Birth Paintings and that became my signature afterwards. I had gone back to re-find who I was, and to see if I returned to that point if my art might develop in another direction. I'm still working on the painting; I seem obsessed with either it, or the process it represents. Working on that small painting is like scraping memory and habit off to get to the back of the cave and seeing what the first marks were. Success is not important in this endeavour. It's all exploration.

So what happened tonight took me by surprise. I am posting the images up to the point where I painted everything white and then proceeded to rub the painting out. It would be an easy piece to re-do since it was from a sketch from a life drawing session which I still have and can reproduce on another canvas.

Who knows, I may re-paint these figures and leave the painting at the point I'm showing you here: unfinished, but still kind of raw, perhaps alive. There is an artist, an Expressionist perhaps, or Post-Expressionist, who this painting reminds me of and when I think of his name I'll pop it into this post (if you know please leave a comment).

It's two figures in contact dance. Actually it's one model in the life drawing session in two poses that I drew on the same page. We do what we can to get the poses we'd like. Because I sought the tensions of the connection point of contact dance, the flow and the seismic lines of energy, I used small lines, a loose construction.



The sketch was done quite awhile ago and the ink had set. Click on the images for larger size.



There was no plan for the painting of the sketch. Lines followed lines; colours suggested colours. I used a plastic egg carton and each colour had its own 'egg nest' and its own brush - 10 all together! This system kept the colors pure, but was akin to a stick game as the brushes often entangled and kept falling!



Click on image for a really large version. 'Contact Dance,' 2009, 14"x10.5", 35.5cmx26.5cm,  India ink and oils on a primed canvas sheet.

Perhaps I should have stopped here. Instead I continued painting, covering the bright colour with a white wash, and then throwing water all over it which got wiped off along with most of the colour. What's left of the painting (see next post) can probably be taken in another direction, and I can re-do what I did here, using this image as a study. Oh, the delights of art-making!

A self-portrait from this morning.




My sweet daughter's photo of me this morning.