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Tag: vision

I was ‘barely old.’

In 2015, when I did this drawing, I was ‘barely old.‘

Leonard Cohen already said the more poetic ‘almost young.’

LIttle did I know; ten years later I would have the energy to complete

my most ambitious project:

Part One (of the diptych) discussed here.

Part Two (of the diptych) discussed here.

I hope to complete my 5′ X 70′ diptych in ~~December~~, ~~January~~, February?

Getting close to completion but I think I’ll go offline for a while.

I am moving slowly.

After completing the visual art I will develop a fuller rationale for the work.

I will write about inspiration, process, and purpose.

And decide on a final name for the diptych.

Then look at the poetic scraps I jotted down, as they sounded to me, during the

drawing & painting.

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Two Symmetrical Suns Illumine the Animal Mask

In memory of twin suns.

In memory of bone & wood.

In memory of transformation.

In memory of antlers.

In magic.

In ecstatic chaos completely forgotten

two symmetrical suns illumine the animal mask.

In memory of stone.

In memory of starlight.

In shape-shifting completely forgotten

two symmetrical suns illumine the animal mask.

Intermediaries of the Otherworld

mediate touch in your fingertips

& mediate muscle

rising the mounts of your palm,

& mediate the joints flexible in your thumbs.

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I did this painting titled ‘Bird Vision’ this summer on a large sheet of mid-weight mixed-media paper. I liked the paper’s softness. I tacked it to a piece of plywood resting that on my easel. Then just started. The artist Marc Cohen described it as ‘Neo-Neolithic with a touch of Fauve.’

November 14, 2014

Double Vision

The left hand and the right hand begin working,

peanuts

Working to create double vision,

new fire h

Perceptualizing the miracle, painting the town red.

einstein einstein

Shrouded within a shimmering portal, same as before,

& Beneath the reflection a mirrored dream of innocence.

In the innocence of mirrored images a mechanism round as a marble

Rises and falls. Shattering above twin, holy worlds. Same as before.

strawberries final

Within this terrible possibility perhaps lies the intrigue,

simone b

An intrigue beyond failure,

Beyond the post-modern landscape any failure is a reassurance.

The reassurance of a terrible possibility.

Mystery centres wrestle with the impending implosion,

Endeavoring round the clock using the latest technology,

Such as sound in the centre of trees,

Processing data, round as a marble,

Rising like a feather in the breeze,

Until night with the force of an atomic blast

Arrives, inspiring the melancholy of the absurd, forever.

The images above were taken from the internet. I do not own the copyright and have recomposed them for purposes of non-commercial parody or commentary under fair use provisions. The personalities are Ho Chi Minh, Einstein’s brain, young John Lennon, actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr, author Simon de Beauvoir, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 16th Century painting Tower of Babel. Film stills are from The Keystone Cops. The mirror is Egyptian, from the 18th Century, held by the Brooklyn Museum. The computer scientist ‘unknown.’

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January 12, 2014

Theory

Physics again standing on its head

Physicists discovering an upside – down world

The elementary particles comprising stars can leap

It seems

Across time (if there really is time) reappearing

And appearing in numerous locations at once

The simultaneous stars stretching across infinity

Are one and the same

Projections of one star

One star only we see here and there

As if altering as if shadowing our days and years

With a spectacularly aloof performance

Like the lover

You just can’t forget

Previously published in my fourth book of poetry Hierarchy of Loss (Ekstasis Editions 2007)

Digital art based on an ink sketch in my moleskin sketchbook.

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June 29, 2013

The World Screened by John Oughton

The world through your window

is screened into rows of tiny cubes

that means we can remake

the world by shifting them

a pure pane of sky shines

from the pine’s arthritic roots

the library is strewn along the walk

which itself winds over

branches, bedrooms. Shadows of things start

elsewhere and cross where they might be cloud

the pedestrian’s two left eyes

regard the sun strolling on her leash

as they move cube by cube over the clear blue lawn

her heart is (not is like) a bird

The World Screened was previously published in Time Slip (Guernica Editions, 2010). John Oughton is a Toronto poet with five books published, and a professor at Centennial College.

I wanted to capture the sense of real/unreal within this poem’s surrealism. The piano motif relates to background music, or a composition, in which the poem seems to move… I juxtaposed pictorial elements playing off the poem’s (in part) bright, Miro-like mood as well as the more subtly expressed romantic, melancholy yearnings.

March 3, 2013

K.C. by Steven McCabe

Seeing the unseen between my eyes and outer space

I was a boy painting my sparkling new bicycle

With house paint

Squinting in the shade of a sunflower

Wiping soil and lumps of melted star off the brush

Aiming for that white-as-a-skeleton-invisible-sky-hourglass

Concept of two gods becoming one

Me and my bicycle at the intersection –

Red lights fading my pupils dilated

from Jawbone – Ekstasis Editions – 2005

When I was a boy in Kansas City, one summer, I studied the sky. It was a dull white far off in the distance, and yet up close ‘it’ was invisible. So it dawned on me to paint my new bicycle white; up close the bicycle would be invisible, at a distance everything would seem normal. My mother was more than happy to keep me busy and found the paint and a couple of large brushes. I threw myself into the task, painting the seat, the chain, the handlebars…everything! Sadly the next day the paint flaked off and my experiment failed. Several decades later I was reading a creation myth about two gods battling in the sky. One god lost a foot to a sharp knife and black ‘blood’ (night of course) filled the sky. I remembered painting the bicycle, and decided to harmonize both ‘sky’ narratives, intertwining them in a poem. My editor reviewed my work and, being a minimalist, took out her pen; underlining, crossing out, and circling lines. In the end I had a nine line poem.

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Tag: vision

November 6, 2024