soon-another: June 2010

June 27, 2010

stand under

knees soldiered up
and when you stand down
it'll be minutes before
you are someplace else

you are destined to stare up at the sun
the soldier will return

June 26, 2010

This is how to remember her. She packed up all her belongings and discarded all of her writing. Her house was left immaculately clean. Purposeful for discovery. The earlier state was of visiting stacks of books and magazines, heaps of clothing, food remains. She held onto everything. Her toes gliding leave trails across the floor when she danced. Green shift dresses for nights in. This is how to find her.

It was in earlier discussions on the phone that we agreed not to leave ourselves behind. Recalling the tale of The Little Mermaid and how she exchanged her voice for legs to roam the land, I always tried to understand why she decided to take flight. She does not find freedom overground and in the end she does not find love. Her body slow and awkward to catch up, she was always late. No voice to talk about who she was and who she thought she hoped she would become. Crushed under the rocks on the beach, she joins her sister as seafoam. Before the earth took on a solid form we were formless bodies comprised of heat, invisible, the substance air our appointed dwelling. Now we live inside.

There comes a point where the body moves away from the emotional and physical imprints imposed on it through memory loops. Maybe she was searching for freedom of weightlessness, the freedom from gravity, freedom from identity, freedom from memory towards the eventual release from the boundaries that define the body. This body is no longer a physical bearer of memories and histories. If you could now see her as she truly is.

June 18, 2010

animals in the form of spheres

June 15, 2010

Beach Bodies

The beach sanctions a space where we can show our skin,
take off our clothes and bathe in light.

It is a place of longing –closest to paradise

Dreaming up beaches in escape

There is a freedom in weightlessness wading into water

and turning primal in our surroundings.

Scrutinizing eyes pull us back

Beach bodies limited to mannequin-esque skins

of godlike proportions

Social spheres –the beach colony, holiday-framed

Watching yourself being watched

Galleries of worshiped flesh

and examples of bodies shamed

Take care,

sunset sunshine

Still holding onto the imagined place of obscurity

where intoxicated bodies move from one state of transience to the next

Permission to roam

Still self-aware

Morning Rain, 2010

Artist statement I wrote for a new series of paintings I am working on

in response to the painting "Islands".

drawing from life

Drawings from the annual Doctors and Derrières live model sessions held each year in Edmonton.

The live model sessions challenge me to draw what is in front of me and break out of habits and repetitions in the way I see and resolve a picture. It is important to return to life drawing. I can watch how the light falls on the body and each model brings their own approach to the sessions. It is just me with a pen and paper sketching the model in the present moment. This is how I have been approaching my new work. Without a preplanned image, without expectations and filtered perceptions. It is honest and raw, even if searching with a pencil in the given moment. The final compositions will be resolved later. I discover the figure instead of inventing her, just as I have not selected these models.

I look forward to these model sessions each year. It is an intimate experience in which someone puts trust in you and each model is unique. Each body has a history and a way they choose to stand before the artists. It is a positive, healthy view of the body and in many ways heals the accumulated anxieties within the skin because it reminds us that we all have bodies that are real and have histories on the skin and are beautiful for being here. The best results come from drawing what is in front of me instead of filling in spaces with what is familiar with my own body. I only work into the drawings when the model is present.

During the winter months, I set up a mirror where I could draw my own body by observation. The drawings are quick impressions and I wanted to capture dance-like gestures.

I also began a series of drawings on grey paper by candle light in front of the mirror. Others with my eyes closed. They are not so much observational but more about portraits looking inside. They are marks created from the body about the body.

These drawings are charged up and cathartic and the outcome not important. Repetitions of the same figure slowly breaks down. Similarly placed next to the person who needs to tell a story over and over because the memories from it keeps intruding the body and talking will help diminish it's presence and the need to revisit (among other reasons for sharing). But I did not create these with an audience and the self-editor is turned down.

I had a mark making tool in one hand and an eraser in the other hand while I drew them and could not see where ink spills occurred. The erased marks leave a resonance of the things I had uncovered. The voices scatter into light created out of erased marks and traces of colour. This exercise is about letting go of stories.

The act of drawing them every day was necessary and I would store them away only taking them out a couple months later. And on viewing them after some distance I want to cover up the noise and restore the mangled and tentative figures to a resolution. There is violence in the marks, where screaming faces, roosters with eye-feather wings, and carnivorous mermaids emerge. I put them up in my room wondering if they should be left unresolved. I'm reluctant to dictate what these emotional snapshots will become based on the associations I keep searching for while standing back in a new head space. Now I am conscious of how these would sit in front of an audience and rearrange them on the walls looking for patterns and balance. They are from the past but still cover every inch of space.