Back with my internal landscape

Getting accustomed to Maine time happens on a number of levels.  There is the physical shift from Greenwich Meantime to Eastern Standard Time; there is the totally open-endedness of time that five weeks brings; but also, time is never really your own when you are with lots of people you love.  I am thinking that I will make a new book for Cheryl Penn's project http://cherylpenn.com/wpb/ an Encyclopaedia of Everything entitled Maine Time - my last book to Cheryl was about tree time http://cherylpenn.com/wpb/?p=2178

Maine always seems to be a fertile place for me, so many memories, associations and a landscape of endless inspiration.  On the first morning as I 'came too' in the light of the barn, far too early but what was my morning... 

Daybreak swim through night-tide

daylight punctuation

 diamond barn ends

The sound of unfamiliar gulls

I was talking to Susan Landor Keegin http://susanlandorkeegin.blogspot.com last night about how one can't really plan what inspires and how that can result in a 'messy' (conflicted) range of images that don't seem to go together.  It's no surprise I began with figurative pastels and abstract fused plastic.

View from Barn Window -pastel on paper 7.5 X 10"

Maine landscape 2013 (1) -fused plastic 7.5 X 5.5

Maine landscape 2013 (2) fused plastic 5 X 4.5

They warned me I'd have to choose

My Academe Mind

Splintering, unfettering, my academe mind

is choking on words.

I watch it slip, drip, congeal,

coagulate in dark flaky patches

on the parquet floor.

Mono-syllabic as a prick of blood,

I think anecdotally, unquantifiably

eye off the lure, beyond the school,

bashing ideas in fish tail swipes,

gulping sea mouths of Harmattan sand. 

RG May 1st, 2013

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I have been two-footedly in the visual world lately. It's as though my thinking brain is atrophying and if I try to think about anything too deeply it's disorienting.  It has been a long time since I lived in my head in that way. Today I found a whole bunch of notes from my dissertation. They were precise and  thoughtful. The primary material was fabulous but I had to read it a few times to remember the significance and to glean the meaning.  I spend lots of time convincing others that the visual and written can converge but when you are two-footed in one it's harder to shift than you think.

Waking to a New Year

Listening for Children

Upstairs I rake sounds through floorboards

tweezing the prosthetic ‘a’ to make sense

of chirps below.  My cheeks decipher walls,

a toe tug and time between years.

I count vertebrae,

sink through baklavaian sheets,

sleeping between teenage sounds,

wonder up aisles of half centuries,

while threading chain to sprocket

with bare hands.

RG 1.1.13

Young people sleeping in the studio.  Limited by the trash in the office bin.

Complacencies of the peignoir

soft pastel on paper 22 x 24cm 

It's easy to avoid things that others scorn. And then I read Messum's catalogue about Nancy DeLouis - she has an upcoming exhibition there and I have to admit feeling affected by her view of the world, a 'feminine' view. It's easy to think you need to change and go a different direction even when you get a thrill out of decorative work.  It's easy to see yourself as dated (rehashing) and then you talk to a few fellow women artists and feel that little bit more confident. 

I've been getting up early and enjoying those hours of the day before anyone else has risen.  I want to do everything, read, write and draw immediately and at the same time. It's often the everyday that take me in.

ZEST OF THE DAY

That hour between

fill of day,

nothing of night

Pre-dawn

milky, lemon zest

stolen before

morning peeled

from night

Ideas that feel

like balancing stones

Hope’s black, cold, clear

watery worlds Those

glazed limpet walls,

smooth, brittle lazuli

beads of dawn.