I'm trying to pick something to read tomorrow night on open mic at Nik Beat's fabulous poetry and music event at QSpace: HOWL. Nik's open mic is the best in the city - he gives readers and performers 5 minutes, instead of the usual minimal 3 minutes. Well worth going to if you are in TO or nearby! Great features - Alana Cook, Liz Worth and Meghan Morrison this month - and many very talented folks will step up to the open mic too. A tea or glass of wine or a beer, some dessert. The finest way to spend the last Sunday evening of every month!

https://www.facebook.com/events/416055368480423/
Howl @ Q Space
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Two Poets on 3 Minute Open Mic Readings at Hot Sauced Words, a poetry event, 21 Feb 2013, charcoal, conte crayon, 80lb archival paper.

Ok, I said I wouldn't. But it's the same night, and I haven't worked on it. These two gents are 3 min poses on Open Mic at Hot Sauced Words. They remind me of Estragon and Vladimir in Becket's Waiting for Godot: ESTRAGON: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You're sure it was here? VLADIMIR: What? ESTRAGON: That we were to wait.

The real poets behind their 3 minute sketches were wonderful, and not Godotian at all.

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Cynthia Gould and Matthew Tierney reading at Toronto WordStage on Wed Feb 13, 2013. 9" x 12", mixed media on Strathmore drawing paper.

I think these will be my last 'poet drawings.' The poses aren't very interesting, the angle at which I sit and the lighting is usually not ideal, there's always a microphone in front of the face, and there isn't enough time to properly draw anyone (and I do not take reference photos, for the record). But the real problem is the amount of time I spend 'finishing' these little drawings. I only consider them exercises, like doing scales, a way to practice drawing, and find that working on them is keeping me from working on my own drawings and paintings. So I am considering sketching sometimes at poetry readings and rarely showing these 'exercises.' While a couple of the women, Cynthia included (she is the first image above) have liked their drawings and posted them publicly, most of the poets I draw say nothing and I'm not sure I'd be happy about uncommissioned drawings of myself either (even if I usually don't name the writer, it's usually pretty clear since I include the date and the venue).

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Copper, silver and gold leaf, and an angel with spiked wings.



Unbelievable that this took the entire afternoon. Detail of Untitled Unfinished Drawing, 2013, Brenda Clews, 28.5cm x 42cm, 11 1/4" x 16 1/2", graphite, India ink, copper, silver and gold leaf in a Moleskine A3 Sketchbook.

Not the best lighting perhaps, but I'm tired, and took about 30 photos and this one will have to do for now.

I had intended to paint it, quite lightly so as not to disturb its quality, but looking at it on a table-top easel, and re-considering, I may only ink in the pencil lines with the grey ink the man is in. Below is the original full sketch, drawn a month ago. Paper in a Moleskine is a pale creamy yellow, as in the painting (albiet it's a bit darker but I used daylight bulbs and what you see was the closest I could get to the original), so I must have over colour-corrected the sketch.



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Incredible footage of the meteor that streaked into Russia that I wanted to keep a link to.

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Last night I watched a couple of episodes of the BBCs Sherlock Holmes on Netflix. It could have been the 3rd, or maybe the 4th, show when Sherlock defined himself as "a high-functioning sociopath," which, truly, he is, and, truly, was a moment of hilarity. My daughter put me on to this show. My son to True Blood, and this after prior years of Buffy and then Angel, and more recently to The Walking Dead (which is excellently acted in a fascinating apocalyptic story of post-viral life -a virus kills a person and turns them into a zombie by using the brain stem and the only way a zombie can die is to have their head, well, uh... it's really good make-up, no CSI). And Lizzie Violet to Luther. Luther so freaked me that I started sleeping with my little string of festive lights on, which my daughter really got a charge out of. But I have an over-active imagination and have never been able to watch thrillers because they do not stay on the screen and always lurk around the corners of my life. I first saw TV when I was maybe 9 - they didn't have TV in Africa in those days - after we had moved to England and got hooked on Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men. Never really took to TV, though I must say these shows are really quite amazing in their scripts, acting and world-views, and, of course, humour.

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...another of my Poets at Poetry Readings Series. Successful "as portrait," no. I don't take reference photos, I didn't have my proper glasses and she was blurry, and there's not very much time to make a 'likeness.' But in other ways, perhaps. I'm ok with what's emerged here.

'A Poet,' 2013, 9" x 12", 22.9cm x 30.5cm, charcoal, conte, pastel on Strathmore archival drawing paper.

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Yesterday was quite some day. First LinkedIn sent me an email saying my profile was among the top 10% viewed in 2012, and then my dear publisher and poetry cafe owner, Luciano Iacobelli, a brilliant poet in his own right, gives me an early May launch for the hand-crafted poetry chap book, 'the illuminist poems,' his press, LyricalMyrical, will publish and get this, a solo art show at Q Space at the same time! Given that I've had 20 years of the most unbelievable closed door experiences and hardly believe anything can go through for me, I am entirely taken by surprise and hardly know how to react. Someone pinch me. And I keep telling myself, I do have the confidence to do all this... 

(Below, potential cover for the chap book.

 ...The figure was drawn by arranging my small art skeleton and drawing it from the comfortable couch across the room while watching a show on Netflix... then I fleshed it out with a woman's form - you can still see the ilium, femur, a little of the patella, the fibula and a little of the tibiar in the leg closest to us. I left the history of the drawing visible by not erasing all of the sketch lines. Later came the India ink, copper silver and gold leaf, writing, and the title/name was added in Photoshop.)


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I have one of the top 10% most viewed @LinkedIn profiles for 2012. That's what LinkedIn, which has now reached 200 million members worldwide, says. Who knows? Doesn't seem possible. But it's still very cute.

An email this morning led to a page on LinkedIn that was ready to Tweet this (which I obligingly did lol): "Hurray! I have one of the top 10% most viewed @LinkedIn profiles for 2012. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/profile/25/084/261"

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Drawing I did last night. Photo taken with daylight bulbs, and one of them was shining perhaps too much on the forehead since the subtle shadows there aren't quite evident enough. But no photo is perfect, is it. The colours are good.

I think I was only aiming for my obsession with people. Understanding us. [Discovered afterwards] ...imparting a quality of strength and pensiveness, a life etched in the patterns of energy that compose the world.

'Pensive Woman,' 2013, 28.5cm x 42cm, 11 1/4" x 16 1/2", graphite, conte, charcoal, pastel, coloured pencil in a Moleskine A3 Sketchbook.

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