poemimage

Where text meets image. Where the visual intersects the literary.
January 27, 2021

GIF Experiments:9 (Variations in the Middle of the Night)

I woke up at 2:30 am and made coffee. No lights in any other windows.

Thoughts while creating 22 new images for Page 70, vignette #2 from Meme-Noir:

I heard a song that reminded me. Those of a certain age who participated in a counter-culture activity will remember ‘coming down’ after ‘peaking.’ Peaking was a moment when the absolute cosmic explanation for Why made itself known as you rushed straight up into it. Just as you grasped it (inside your head) it vanished. You tried to remember, wasn’t it only a second ago, but it was gone. And suddenly you were ‘coming down.’ Coming down in your body, through your body, was fraught. I started thinking about Theosophy-inspired landscapes and symbols. How those artists would depict peaking. I thought about young people with no tribal initiation or shamanic guidance thrown into powerful hallucinogenic experiences without protection.

Ten of the new images:

 

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January 26, 2021

GIF Experiments:8 (One line from a vignette)

Because I created such a large number of digital images… to accompany the second vignette from page 70 in Meme-Noir, I decided to create separate GIFs. In this first GIF I use the first line of the vignette only, and approach the words from various angles. How memory repeats significant conversations that perhaps didn’t go the way they could have. That will be more clear in the second GIF to come.

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I appreciate the funding from the Digital Originals program to create GIFS from my recent book Meme-Noir.

 

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January 17, 2021

Hoax

The chandeliers hung like earrings above the empty ballroom

A saxophone home to spiders

One bare shoulder on a marble bust.

 

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December 9, 2020

3rd Draft @ 104,896 Words

The 2nd draft stood at roughly 80,000 words after removing 20,000 words, give or take, from where it stood after the 1st draft. This time the edit seemed to go in reverse as I developed connections, elaborations, new scenes, etc… and added almost 25,000 words to the total.

In the New Year the scissors will be out again for the 4th draft. Speaking of which, my father’s father was a barber during the Great Depression. He was, by all accounts – and as I can attest, a frightening man although he did feed his family during perilous times. My father ended up with his barbershop gear and, much to my displeasure, put them to use on Saturday mornings. That doesn’t really have anything to do with editing the 4th draft. But of course it does.

Update: As of today (1/3/2021) the 3rd draft (which I thought was complete) has grown to 131,287 words. Which means the next draft/edit will take longer than anticipated although I don’t know why I anticipated anything at all. The story-idea hasn’t wanted to stop although I think (hope) now it has.

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November 5, 2020

30″ X 40″

Finished this last summer and spent the last two days ‘touching it up.’ More like completely reworking it. It’s part of a ‘blue-ish’ series called Welcome to The Ice Age.

I needed to do something tactile after an overwhelming slew of ‘conceptual’ stuff generated piles of paper (& text) over a month or more. And then the GIF experiments.

What’s strange about Photoshop is how it reveals something when you manipulate the image. Now I see a Druidic figure in the upper right  observing the central image in the painting.

It seems he was there all along. And horned no less. I didn’t notice. Cernunnos? Celtic shaman?

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Image | November 3, 2020
wordless-into-the-night

   

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Image | November 2, 2020
OnceUponpoetryart
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Image | November 1, 2020
comicsgif

   

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Image | October 27, 2020

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October 26, 2020

GIF Experiments:3 (My brother’s fish & my father’s funeral)

 

My brother cried, ‘Popeye is dead. Popeye is dead. He was inconsolable.’ His little google-eyed black fish perished overnight and floated in the bowl. At my father’s funeral the stress of the previous day’s open-casket visitation almost pushed my siblings and myself over the edge. We sat in a row along the pew, waiting for the minister to speak, our strange hushed laughter bubbling.

 

 

I appreciate the support given to me by the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Originals program in funding this GIF project based on text (with added images) from my most recent book Meme-Noir.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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