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.

For those of you following my story about YouTube sending me a "Copyright Violation" notice because Rumblefish claimed copyright content on the soundtrack for 'Videopoetry: Voicings,' (which I had made in GarageBand from a voice recording, a midi file generated from the text of the poem, and some small GarageBand loops, all absolutely legal):

5:54 PM (today)

Hi Brenda,

I have released this claim. Apparently is has been misidentified by the YouTube content matching system.

Best,

-Ben

****|Catalog Manager
****@rumblefish.com |

My original post with all the emails is here:
http://brendaclews.blogspot.com/2012/01/rumblefish-copyright-notice-from.html

Nice of him to 'blame' YouTube. YouTube had originally written that: "Your video, Videopoetry: Voicings, may have content that is owned or licensed by rumblefish." Yesterday, I wrote back to Rumblefish, and registered a Dispute over this claim with YouTube, and they have backed off.  YouTube gives you only 48 hours from the time the notice is sent out to dispute a claim - then YouTube puts an advertisement on your video which generates money for Rumblefish (or whoever's made the claim) and YouTube.

While I am glad this issue was resolved quickly, it does make me wonder how many artists get hit like this and don't fight back.

Sent from YouTube at 5:38am Sunday morning (and apparently you only get 48 hours to dispute a claim against your work):

 Dear brendaclews,

Your video, Videopoetry: Voicings, may have content that is owned or licensed by rumblefish.

No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.

Sincerely,
- The YouTube Team

So I sent rumblefish an email at 8:52am:

Dear Rumblefish,

I have received copyright notice from YouTube that I've used your music.

I am in shock.

No, I have not used your music, nor violated any copyright as far as I know. Reciting a poem I had written (which I can prove), I generated a midi file on-line with text from the poem (which is entirely legal and free, I know one of the creators of that site), and looped a few seconds of some garageband sounds in the distant background. I've scoured GarageBand and do not see anywhere that using a short loop of a few seconds is illegal.

So I am *very* confused.

I can send a .jpg of my GarageBand track.

YouTube is going to put an ad on a video that I slaved over - making that track was a lot of work!

Can you explain to me why you are claiming my voice track as yours? The commercial world can be befuddling to a poet.

http://youtu.be/cj4wdx03Lhk

Thank you,

Brenda Clews


At 11:10am, I sent a second email:

Please Note: I made the sound track myself - from my own voice recording of me reciting my own poem and using a midi file that I generated from my own text and a few small GarageBand loops, as my screen capture of my GarageBand file shows. I've lodged a Dispute Claim with YouTube.

Thank you so much for your kind attention to this matter.

I hope it is resolved soon.

regards,

Brenda

Using GarageBand loops as part of your mix, even for commercial use, is legal and free. From Apple Support http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2931:

"The GarageBand software license agreement says:

"GarageBand Software. You may use the Apple and third party audio loop content (Audio Content), contained in or otherwise included with the Apple Software, on a royalty-free basis, to create your own original music compositions or audio projects. You may broadcast and/or distribute your own music compositions or audio projects that were created using the Audio Content, however, individual audio loops may not be commercially or otherwise distributed on a standalone basis, nor may they be repackaged in whole or in part as audio samples, sound effects or music beds."

So don't worry, you can make commercial music with GarageBand, you just can't distribute the loops as loops."

I definitely did not infringe on any copyright by using GarageBand loops, then.

Click here to see my next post for the resolution to this issue.

I am humbled and amazed by these responses to my latest and most ambitious and longest videopoem, Tangled Garden. I thought no-one would take the time to watch it, and I am still taken aback that anyone has. I have a confession to make, I save these comments for bleak days. You have no idea how you inspire me and how much I love you all.

Francois Caroline writes: "Yes this film is good, I am a French poet, writing all day long, but I have never seen such a beautiful creation."

Pierre-Marie Cœdes writes: "I am astounded by so much intelligent creativity : poem, recitation, body performance, imagery, effects, editing, the music with entrancing voice ... all this has led me into an hypnotic voyage, guided by an entrancing voice depicting a world of sensations, inside invisible universal actions, kaleidoscope beings... I just could not take my eyes off the rapture of the incessant movements of the beautiful energized figures in motion ... and ... and ... this is a real masterpiece of art in motion, the expression of a human spirit entangled in so many nature forces, creating, destroying, returning ...

Read the explanation of the author, Brenda Clews, if you do not want to lose your senses ...

Awesome and astounding ..."

Bill Sprague writes: "I just finished watching it. Oh My God, Brenda !! -- That was AMAZING.. I have not had the pleasure to absorb anything so powerful in at least a dozen years. Spiritual, mystical, classically timeless... flowers fly with my standing ovation. Excellent Work !!!"



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 impromtu 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.

A blog post describing the making of Tangled Garden.

direct link: Tangled Garden, a triptych of nature poems by Brenda Clews, 2012.

Tangled Garden: a triptych of nature poems, a video/filmpoem by Brenda Clews

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

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

Beautiful singing by the musician, Catherine Corelli mixed from her album, Seraphic Tears (2010) on Jamendo (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.


In contrast to the zippy, fast cuts and commercial-like flavours of many video/filmpoems, Tangled Garden is a slow virtually single-shot video. It is an 'art film.' It is 22 minutes of slowed-down footage. It does move through a process that is Surreal and dream-like. Not much happens, but a lot passes by, if you know what I mean. Tangled Garden is the opposite of an action film.

It has taken 9 months to produce this video. I used some of the footage - you might recognize it - for two 'Solstice' videopoems, non-religious celebrations, one commemorating the beginning of my favourite season, Summer, 'Green Goddess' Masque and one celebrating finding the light in the darkness of Winter, Shadow Cave, because I liked the dance clips, but they were always intended for this videopoem. Tangled Garden is a major piece for me.

Tangled Garden unfolds in a spatial and painterly way; it is not narratorial or linear. I often work with doubles, dopplegängers and reflections, with subjectivities, the selves that compose us, and there is little of that here, but minimally. Rather, the focus is the poetry itself. Three nature poems are spoken as a voiceover, poems that span 30 years. I made a subtitle track (that took 3 days with lots of subsequent corrections), so you can read along if you like.

Three clips form the visual tracks of the video poem. The initial background was shot in early May 2011 in Niagara Falls and the two dance clips on different days in High Park in Toronto (accompanied by my daughter who read while the tripod held the camera videoing me dancing) in June 2011. Both of the dance clips have been worked extensively in Final Cut to arrive at the visual patterns that you see here. As an artist, my video work is very painterly, and I find I compose video canvases based on the static, pictorial vision of a painting. Perhaps they are paintings in motion.

After I shot the initial footage of the plant foliage on May 9, 2011, during a sleepless night on that trip I watched the clip over and over on the small viewfinder of my video camera, wondering what I would do with it. Without seeing earth or sky, a breeze blowing through the tangle of leaves and stalks, light breaking through when the wind was stronger, I found it very rhizome-like, and it reminded me of my memories of my life in that I could enter or exit anywhere and still arrive at an understanding of who I am.

I wrote 'A Floral Opera' (2011) for that initial footage, and for Catherine Corelli's voice in her incredible neoclassical metal album, Seraphic Tears, which I had listened to enroute to Niagara Falls.

Tangled Garden is composed of three earth poems. 'A Floral Opera' is, I feel, one of my most successful poems. Later in the year, having collected 20 years worth of my journals in a large basket, I began going through them, and found a poem written in 1979 based on a dream I had had. 'In the Hands of the Garden Gods' (1979) describes that dream, and it seemed to match the footage and was another approach to the themes 'A Floral Opera' alluded to. I decided to include the older poem. Currently I live near the rooming house where I had rented a small ground floor apartment as a graduate student and where I wrote 'Garden Gods,' and one night, quite far along in the editing of the filmpoem, I had a 'Eureka moment' on the street corner near the house where I once lived: the strange central figure that I have created in the video, the one who moves slowly through the 22 minutes, almost exactly duplicates the transforming earth muse figure, the "lady, lady, lady" who appeared in the dream I had in 1979! Our lives are a strange unity. The final poem that I included was another earth poem, 'Slipstream, the Tangled Garden,' (2006) about hungry ghosts, time, death and the resurrection of life that continues through us even if when we shall no longer exist.

In between the three poems is some ad-libbed talking that I initially did while watching the footage and which my daughter encouraged me to include in the final version. The impromptu speaking is a bit repetitive, but perhaps that's a welcome refrain from the densely packed imagery of each of the poems. After each of the 'official' poems I have put '~~~' in the subtitle track to note their ending and that what follows is a speaking between poems.

The themes in the poems are quite complex, but also they are rich with imagery that I hope holds your attention. They are strange, Surreal, dream-like, body-based, earth-centred, full of reflection, passion, living. The three poems together cover the span of a lifetime of rumination on Nature, the meaning of being alive, having a woman body, birth, life, death, amidst the heritage of our intellectual culture and the extraordinary creativity of our planet which I call the "green fire." A planet we are busy overrunning with our extreme fertility as a species and our polluted ways. I don't, however, push the 6th mass extinction that we are in, though the outlook for our species is gloomy. Emphatically, the "green fire" is far stronger than us. We are merely representations, minuscule embodiments of the earth's creative energy. I embrace the earth's deep and fecund creativity. In the tangled garden of our lives on our natal earth there is beauty, grace, love, compassion, sorrow, fear, caring, and sweetness, sweetness.

Photograph from my videopoem, Tangled Garden, 2012. The resolution of the final video won't be too bad, I think. A fair bit of chartreuse, and other spring greens - the footage is a mixture of 3 clips, one from early May, two from later in June 2011 - that smaller figure on the left also does not appear too often in the videopoem. It's an art film, slow, spatial and painterly rather than narratorial and linear. Made by a single artist rather than a team, a very slow performance piece. The poetry spans 30 years, so represents a lifelong rumination on an earth-centred vision and spirituality. Currently saving a version for uploading to YouTube. Subtitles all done. This is my most ambitious project to date.