Poem

Day and night come hand in hand like a boy and a girl pausing only to eat wild berries out of a dish painted with pictures of birds.

They climb the high ice-covered mountain, then they fly away.  

But you and I don't do such things.

We climb the same mountain; 

I say a prayer for the wind to lift us but it does no good; you hide your head so as not to see the end..

Downard and downward and downward and downward is where the wind is taking us.

I try to comfort you but words are not the answer; I sing to you as mother sang to me.

Your eyes are closed. 

We pass the boy and girl we saw at the beginning; now they are standing on a wooden bridge;

I can see their house behind them;

How fast you go they call to us, but no, the wind is in our ears, that is what we hear....

And then we are simply falling....

And the world goes by, all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last;

I touch your cheek to protect you.

Poem by Louise Gluck

poem blankets

I finished another poem blanket and then photographed all four, one at a time on the line with the beautiful morning light.   Two Rumi, One Neruda, and an Agnes Martin.

I like that these old blankets are worn, as if they are carrying lived time.  It is a most beautiful thing.  

This body of work addresses the bed.  Bed coverings connect to sex, death, birth, dream, the vulnerability of sleep, healing, reading, and that liminal space between sleep and wakefulness where we have the best ideas.  Blankets have a powerful voice.    

Blankets cause an emotional response. 

Emotional response is how I chose the text.  It had to be worth putting on a blanket.  

I thought that I could cover all the 'bed' things - but there are two love poems already.    

The final step is adding a wide strip of blanket cloth along the top to put a rod through so that they can hang on a wall.  

Old blankets bring past relationships to mind.  

They are connected to the body and to the most primal of human needs and acts.  (Radka Donnell)

spider circle webs in the grass

Try not to think that words are the material of thought.  The articulation of meaning can come through handling materials.  In fact, making through materials is a superior kind of thought.  Material is the most real thing that there is.  (Anni Albers idea) . 

"She clutched at her blankets as a faller clutches at the turf on the edge of a cliff.  Her eyes opened wide.  Here she was again, she thought, sitting bold upright in bed.  Awake."  

Virginia Woolf      To The Lighthouse

About the love poems.  Maybe it's OK if there are more of them than the other subjects.  

These four are going into a group exhibition next month and the images in this post are about preparing them for display and for shipping.   For more information about this show, please click here.

I don't think I'm finished with this body of work.  If I come across a poem that needs to be put onto an old blanket, I will put it onto an old blanket until I run out of old blankets.

Seen in Gore Bay yesterday.

Lingering

One of the main challenges I have faced as a woman artist is the conflict I feel about caring for someone, loving someone, yet remaining dedicated to my art in an undivided way.

I think that generally men find it much easier to be selfish.  And you do need to be selfish.  Ideally you need 'to care and to not care'.  You need to give yourself completely, while at the same time seeing things from a distance. 

Every important creative act has this duality: of giving everything and then of letting go, so that the created work can have a life of its own.

I would like this book to speak to young women artists - and perhaps to all women who will no doubt face this challenge in their lives at some time and will have to resolve this conflict in their own way.

This seems to be essentially a feminine dilemma.  Throughout history, women have too often been seen as subjects of art, rather than artists.  Their natural propensity for giving themselves up to the experience, combined with an aptitude for stillness, has made many women great muses to great male artists.

As a woman painter, one needs to work out a strategy: I feel the need to put up barriers to protect my solitude.  I agree with Virginia Woolf that the vital thing for a woman artist is ' a room of one's own.'  

Celia Paul

 

All the previous text  is from the Prologue to Celia Paul's memoir Self Portrait.  

I loved reading this book slowly over about ten days.  I took my time with it because I did not want to finish it.  I snapped it shut after a few pages, saving its depth and resonance for another day.  I consumed it like dark chocolate, loving it, looking forward to the still unread sections.  

By understanding Celia Paul through her very honest self-gaze, I understood myself.  The book is about a woman artist's interiority.  It is rare to find something so poignant and true.

Self Portrait has had rave reviews, please see here and here and here.

Celia Paul is interviewed by the very intelligent and perceptive Judith Thurman here.  

The way I feel about this book is how I feel about my green quilt.  I linger over it.  I'm so in love with spending time with it, intentionally going at it slowly, knowing I will miss handling it when it is finished, but at the same time wanting to work on it, eager to work on it, wanting to see it done so that I can move on, even though I love it in my lap, under my hands.  Becoming finished.  How can I express this feeling in words?

In my mind the name of my quilt is 'lamentation' and it has only been in my hoop for a little more than two months.   When I hand pieced the squares together a year ago, I un-picked and re-stitched over and over as I worked towards creating a meadow of green that would encourage our eye to keep moving.  Now the double grid of quilting stitches seem to give this field a 'mysterious stillness'. 

The rest of this post continues with more text from Celia Paul's memoir.        

Painting is the language of loss.  The scraping-off of layers of paint, again and again, the rebuilding, the losing again  Hoping, then despairing, then hoping.  Can you control your feelings of loss by this process of painting which is fundamentally structured by loss?

Painting has a unique relation to time.

A painting that has been done quickly has a different energy from a painting that has been done slowly.  A painting that has been done quickly is like a newly decorated room and the air is fresh, empty and echoing.  A painting that has been done slowly is like a room that has been quietly lived in: it acquires a mysterious stillness.

When you are overpowered by loss and grief, you stare at the image, almost uncomprehendingly, not knowing or caring about how to define the thing you see.

Celia Paul

about orbits and dreams and also about bed / boat and melancholy / fragility / durability and also about stars

In this dark month, 

I'm looking at things differently.

Embroideries I made in a younger time,

for a different project,

are cut and re-arranged into a garden,

stitched to new cloth.  

Seeing them being reborn enlivens me.  

enlarges my spirit. 

This new work is round and bright

and fragile and soft.

Stitching it, making it

helps me to accept the winter coming

and my ageing 

I have been stitching new circles

one after the other.

Bowls of silence.  (Rumi's words)

Circles and dots

that represent Gaia's rhythm.

The natural cycles of the sun and the moon and the planets and the stars

and how they relate to earth. 

Cosmic time pieces.

The earth revolves on her axis in one day,

the moon orbits the earth in one female month,

the earth orbits the sun in one year.

Gaia rhythm.

Earth clocks.

under the blue sky my clock-faced flowerbeds reflect the orb of the sun

they never sleep

lying awake under the starry constellations, they listen to the music of  time.

they chuckle, yes they chuckle 

and gossip.

I walk in this garden holding the hands of dead friends  

Old age came quickly. 

Cold, cold, cold, they died so silently.

My gilly flowers, roses, violets blue, 

sweet garden of varnished pleasures, 

please come back next year.

                                                                  Derek Jarman

BLOG

Just a quick note here to let people know that I am fine.    

The exhibition is beautiful and I will write more about that soon.

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I'm home now and loving being here after traveling to the exhibition near Ottawa and visiting some of our grown children and young grandchildren in Ottawa and Toronto.  

These days I am cleaning and decluttering my house, gathering my life story from my old journals and stitching in the mornings on my 90 inch square muslin and indigo quilt, grateful for it.   

The island state is a state of remaining within one's own boundaries, undisturbed by any external influence; it resembles a kind of narcissism or even autism.   One satisfies all one's needs on one's own.  Only the self seems real.    Olga Tokarczuk  

she dropped into a dreamless sleep

I ask myself:  What am I doing? 

I answer:  I am making art.

I am making softness. 

I want my work to remain with you long after you physically leave.  

I have to trust my intuition all the time.    

"I think it is crucial to be aware of the things that come with intuition,  art, poetry, love, and to keep them alive because they don't weigh very much in the balance anymore."  Benoit Aquin  film artist  

I recently completed the audio book How To Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee.  The last essay was entitled  "On Becoming an American Writer" . 

Chee teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College and often has to defend the art form to his own students.  They ask him "What is the point?"  "How can we keep making art in this world?" 

Alexander Chee answered his students in this essay.  He told them that art dedicated to tenderness is not weak, it is strong.  He said that this is the only world we have.  

He said:    

“I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew and I know that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we have. "

“I needed to teach writing students to hold on—to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they write. We won't know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be better served when it does by having done the work we can do.”

“That art -- even, or perhaps especially, art that is dedicated somehow to tenderness, dedicated as a lover who would offer something to her beloved in the last nights they'll share before she leaves this life forever -- is not weak. It is strength.”  

 "After a long time, he drew her against him and spread the edge of his cloak over her.  They lay side by side, barely touching, letting the power of the sun and the earth and the air move through them in harmony and she dropped into a dreamless sleep. " 

                                              Marion Zimmer Bradley (Mists of Avalon)