Imagine if you might... the top floor of this building is a dislocated airport atmosphere, an ice age wisp-moment, a lavender ghost shark air-quarium. It'll be my home for a full day of drawing, all my pencils scattered around me as I slowly, slowly grow a sun in graphite, flames licking in slow motion to fill a gigantic paper on the floor. My temporary home and magic carpet ride, ha!
If I could extend this to a 24-hour performance and watch the nightlight twinkle in all colours of the city all around me, all alone in the sky........ I would, oh I ..... all for the want of an after-hours pass. :/
These are some friends of mine. Accidental videos are the sidewaysest! I mean the best.
O HAI
Oh, and Montreal is pretty much designed to climb all up over at a moment's desire, if you can take a bit of dust and the moderate thrill of kicking your boots against the side of old buildings at people's head level. We saw had the most epic-ly boring evening right after, with stolen birthday cake and deliberately terrible karaoke and Eddie Vedder's ghost channeled into a roots rocker and it was AWESOME.
I also totally wasn't kidding about the birds. They were having a little tea party this morning in the lot behind the arts building! So springy, wish I'd had some breadcrumbs in my pocket, even if it is a strange thing to carry around. I know it's not the most amazing picture in the world, but actually if you look at it for more than 4 seconds it starts to become quite beautiful, like a cloud of smoke or daydream of park light... oooweeeeooooooooooo. It was kind of a moment, and I also got a big kick out of taking pictures of presumably nothing, a couple steps away from the art hang, because regardless of how eccentric it might look, in that general vicinity bird-picturing ranks a modest LOW in weird behaviour.
Sometimes my mailbox is a day-brightener. Every so often I remember the #1 perk of making & trading zines, and that is getting to read other people's. A girl named Keet sends me her creations every so often and every time it's like a fresh breeze, xeroxed cheesy dancing kinda smile-making stuff. This most recent one came with robot postcards, even! And the book is little thoughts and twisty snippets of musings on life, I quite love it ---
To get yrs, and ask her for anything else she's done cause it's all awesome I assure you: NERDTURD@Gmail.com will set you right.
I'm still alive! I've been busy with the end of semester, working on a few larger paintings for class, and hoping that I manage to step away from the brushes long enough for things to dry so I can take them into school without smudging them all over. Lately it's all been about colour and fluidity... and big dots. And wishing I had more tubes to choose from. This summer I'm taking another painting course though, meaning a lot of focused attention and hopefully some splurges at the art store. New brushes and solvents and surfaces, oh my! Who needs a vacation when you can build worlds at the end of your bed/studio? :D (I'm only half joking!). I can always do Asia after school (and that way I don't have to come back if I don't want to...)
So you probably also noticed that's a self portrait up there. Or, um... if you've ever seen me, you'd know that's my funny face. Appropriately sitting on my pirate lunchbox canvas perch (!) anyway, I needed to make a new one after destroying the last one in my first public performance two weeks ago. The project was a combination "destroy something you love" and healing piece that involved Javanese gamelan music, an ancient television set, a huge pair of scissors and a bucket of white housepaint called "Moonlight". It went so powerfully, even if the documentation video ended up being pitch black, *sob*. Maybe I'll post it anyway, but it's really really lame and all you can see is a fuzzy blue screen and my arms flailing around. Ah well, such is life. I'll just have to be brave and attempt another performance, maybe this one with a light source around? ha.
Here's also a sneak look at the kind of work I'm doing right now. Again, very colour based...
It's very much not finished, but it's close, and my vision in pigment is starting to speak the same language as my drawings, which I'm happy about. I'm even kind of pleased about the big blank bare canvas spots... don't ask me why. If I had to speak inspiration... I'm waist-deep in Chinese philosophy right now, which was almost certainly a subconscious force here. The whole Jade thing it's got going on, as well as rather perfectly exemplifying the Neo-Confucian concept of Li, which is "the underlying intelligence and order of nature as reflected in its organic forms", as quoted from Wiki.
It's really astonishing actually, how the world orders itself into an awkward & pure perfection. The other day I found myself staring at the folds of my headband hanging off the radiator in the bathroom, remembering the dark shape and feeling almost as if I'd seen it before. Or drawn it before. And I probably had. Which makes me wonder about chaos and how much our surroundings are shaped by the physical way we interact with them, and how much by our perception of it all. Like, when I toss a book on my bed... does it land in a particularly Elizabeth sort of way, and I'm inclined to say yes? And in that case... is making oatmeal or catching the bus art? Holding a pencil or a lover is the same? And when I see a book that someone else has tossed upon their bed, do I mentally alter the angle and colour to fit into what I've deemed aesthetically comfortable to MY reality? If it doesn't, what happens then? Who designates this Li stuff, anyway? !!
So spring is in the air, almost just peeking it's way around the corner and I am R.A.C.I.N.G. to get as much drawing done as possible. I find winter very insulating in a creative way. Maybe incubating would be a better word? Anyway, I'm actually a little sad to see the snow start to go... it was my blank canvas, a little bit.
This latest project is my newest zine... I haven't found a name for it yet, although this morning as I was curled into an unpleasantly morphing nauseous ball after a night of wayyyyyy too much whiskey, two names did float through my head that could start the chain reaction towards the correct title. "i don't really believe in the apocalypse" or or "sweetest sun". Something like that. (sidenote: don't you just love the gracefully random things a subconscious can bubble up in the throes of hypnagogia?)
It isn't necessarily about the apocalypse. It's definitely planetary though, a bit epic. Probably a lot more about growth and seeds, evolving, creation myths, all tied together with the idea that it will end and it's all ended before. But it's not heavy! Actually! Maybe it's the page made up entirely of adorable snack food? Snack food is kinda a theme, too, because it's MY zine suckers. :P
I've also been nominated for the Kreativ Blogger award by the luminous and fruity K from Apricot Belly! I am supposed to list 7 things that I love, and then pass this award onto 7 other bloggers. I... don't really know 7 other art bloggers, and thusly I'll make this a little mission to find a few, how's that? Here goes!
"What are 7 things you love?"
1. Life! I think it's juicy and confusing and never boring and even when it hurts it's kinda funny in a horrible way. And it keeps improving, how is that? age 80 is going to ROCK SOCKS.
2. Making things with my hands (and my heart and brain). Making things in general. Give me a void and some tools to fill it and I am a happy happy girl. I kinda leave trails around wherever I go... ^^;
3. My experience of the divine. It's been there like an extra halo of radiance on everything since as long back as I can remember. (I will divulge that the white circles that are allll over my work are probably very very related to this).
4. Dancing like a moron. Dancing like a flower. Visualizing the earth coursing up through my ridiculous giant Canadian Winter Boots as I cyborg-prance at crazy parties.
5. The city of Montreal. It done me good. It made me a woman! I'm not even kidding.
6. Waking up at 4 in the morning to make myself an elaborate bowl of oatmeal. Nurse said oatmeal for 2+ hours reading whatever thick and conceptual book I've managed to find lately. Drink piping hot yerba mate alongside. Finish said breakfast. Then Go Back To Bed. Love it.
7. My kitty!!!! Okay, and every single one of my friends. Especially my oldest ones. I have really really really rad friends. Loyal and strange and beautiful, all of them. My family too. "my friends and family"? Well DUH I love them!!!!
Enough mushiness though. Here's some impossible band playing at the Sala Rossa's Japanese Night coming up March 4th. I'll be there! You should be too!
tamagoléoptera Oh right! Almost forgot (and okay, so I do know some artsy bloggers):
" I saw two necks, male velvet strong, lamplit mid-keyboard swell in a freeze frame embrace, the air smokey and sweet with the smell of youth and january hope... remembering for a moment that we all will die. one's dress shimmered silver and silk, his beard wrapped around a nightlong grin and beer bottles clattered like softly tossed snow around the room. There were promises flourishing everywhere, between the languid and the crazed, the blind and the violent, the yogi, the yoni and the star, because - for the most part - we were young and youth is designed for grasping of all kinds. "
today I woke up and I was a ghost. How strange! made of lines, eleven years of words and promises and opinions and stories. boys and mistakes and doodles and heroes and days. I am having a hard time creating words. Right. Now. They are so permanent and so wrong... and just who am I now anyway? I walked up and down the street, fingers numbing in the cold and my mind numbing too... a Self dimming and fleeting to leave just the skin. So in a way it's a shell with no soul. OR is it a soul bared completely with no body to recognize? As much as a soul can be summed up in an A B C kind of way, and just how WAS your tuesday? Dear diary, I never wrote dear diary at all. Who was I talking to? It wasn't me. I haven't found a ME definitive enough to be the fulcrum of these words yet. There is a good story I'm wearing, it's a one-of-a-kind couture made from the hundreds of voices that all went by E. Ranger (except that phase where I wanted to be called - wait for it - Willow Moon, and I really don't count her as part of the Me-ish canon at ALL, what a chimp!.... <----- Artistic license). Like a relay race of my own name... with no prize and no finish but apparently a decent uniform and oh there's unlimited graphite!
ANYway. I hate reading my own writing. The End."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I consider this my first real performance. I had to psyche myself up all morning to go outside but I needn't have been so reluctant. This was exhilarating!!!!!!!!
I only walked. That's it. I walked slowly and at one with the Persona. Cars slowed down, people did double and triple takes. My hands felt like they would crack right off in the sub-zero weather, but I kept going, vision at once blurred by the pantyhose and sharpened by the contacts and pure creative high.
Seriously, this is like my dreams coming true. Literally. The fantasies I lost myself in as a kid, the strange characters that I still draw... stepping off the page and into YOUR TUESDAY MORNING. What the hell??? I love life! I'm wearing this suit again.
To get yrs, and ask her for anything else she's done cause it's all awesome I assure you: 
I'm still alive! I've been busy with the end of semester, working on a few larger paintings for class, and hoping that I manage to step away from the brushes long enough for things to dry so I can take them into school without smudging them all over. Lately it's all been about colour and fluidity... and big dots. And wishing I had more tubes to choose from. This summer I'm taking another painting course though, meaning a lot of focused attention and hopefully some splurges at the art store. New brushes and solvents and surfaces, oh my! Who needs a vacation when you can build worlds at the end of your bed/studio? :D (I'm only half joking!). I can always do Asia 
