Orion

Here's the newest poem I have going, in honor of my favorite constellation. Let me know if the repetition gets distracting (especially the "you"s). I find repetition irresistible and sometimes need help recognizing when it's ineffective. Also, some of the lines are a little too long for this format - there are 4 lines per stanza.

Orion

Who were you that the virgin loved? Who taught her to abandon
the night-chilled grass and dew between her toes? You were warm
and she learned the taste of sweat. The salt that lingered on the tip of her tongue
was no immortal taste. You always hunted in the sun.

Her brother disapproved, as brothers always do. I think it was his jealousy
he saw when you rose from the sea. That’s what he dared her
to shoot. When she found you washed up on the shore, your body
had stiffened and your hands were frozen into fists.

For pity you were jeweled into the sky, to burn cold and white.
She was given a belt she could never unbuckle,
an outline of you she could barely see, and never touch.
She began to love the moon for its closeness to you.

The sisters thought they could escape your hunt if
they turned to doves or stars. But you and they
are frozen mid-chase, and she is forever forced to watch you.
She barely recognizes you; she never saw you hold still.

The dawn (another lover) erases you, wraps you
in light that, like a smallpox sprinkled blanket,
was never intended to warm you. She does not want anyone
to see you like this, cold and empty.

Who were you? A man, just a man. Taller than most, with broader
shoulders. Your warm breath and whiskers scratched
the nape of her neck. You are no longer anything
but a sketch of a man, etched for pity into the sky.

Let's Continue To Destroy the Box

This piece is about in the fast paced world, we digest images. A lot of images. Many of these images are in the form of graphics. A visual representation expressing a certain of a brand industry or popular culture product. Graphics although great, tend to hide information. They are pure images that express only the ideal condition. A McDonald's logo is a symmetrical bright fun form. However what it doesn't show is the grease stains, the uniforms (both executive and behind the counter) the people, and the process. It is a designed image by a graphic designer with a bias agenda. That agenda is simply McDonald's is classic, American, and delicious. Now to take it to another level, words do the same thing. The word house does not look like a house, it just represents the physical form. The word house itself is a graphic and a sentence is a collection of graphics to form information. This explores the ideas of what is a graphic? What is a word? How do we communicate with each other and what does a sign, text message, or a car logo say about the individual, the group, and society?

This continues to explore "destroying the box." The process of destroying creates new conditions and redefines the old conditions. This is the mentality I feel we need to move forward, not just in art, but in all aspects of culture. We have to start redefining conditions. What is abstract? Don't paint abstract, redefine abstract in your own terms. What is marriage? Is it between two people or four people? Originality is just reinventing past conditions and applying them to the present.

However the new conditions will create a new box that will contain its own laws. It is the responsibility of people to maintain the box, but when they need to adjust, they cannot be afraid to change and even become what they destroyed in the first place. Everything is expandable.

Magnum Opus of Awkwardness and Sadness

These are the development and completion of a fractal flower. Now that I have this iteration of the flower I can fold it one more time and have two versions of it. I don't know if I could physically draw a third fold at this scale.







Directly underneath is a drawing I did at a party last weekend. I liked it enough to continue working on it. The drawing below that is after working on correcting some of the mistakes on her face (I drew it a couple more times but they're not shown here). Her face still needs a little more work. When I have everything that I want in place I am going to enlarge it at kinkos and draw it from the larger version using ink and small water colour brushes. Her hair is going to be made of an ink wash.







Directly above are plans for the final version of the flower which will go around her head. The large circular pattern will be made more even and the line weights adjusted. Each of the circles inside of the radial flower will be filled with a fractal flower.

This is what I've been working on for the past week. (Although I drew the fractal flower a while ago so that doesn't count.) I think I need to learn how to write about these things in an exciting manner.

Visual Response

So in the spirit of collaboration, I thought I would visually respond to Lauren's poem. This illustration is the first reaction I had to the piece. I liked the temperature of the piece. I felt cold while reading it. I looked at the nightingale as hope. I think we visualize hope in the many forms of institutions (such as college), friends, parties, presidents, so it's subjective. We control our hope and what we want it or ourselves to be. I mean I could be COMPLETELY wrong about the whole nightingale thing, but art is made to be adapted and the author will never fully be able to control what the reader interprets it as. One reader, one hope, one idea.

nightingale.

In my communications class (The Documentary Form), as we were watching a propaganda film, I started writing. It mainly comes from this one line I've been mulling over: "I often wonder about her drunk father." Heavy, I know. But I like it a lot, so here's a bit of a free write, a starting point. Err...let me know stuff? Hah, I'm not one to share a lot of poetry, even if it's fiction like this, but here you go.

* * *

That afternoon under snow cloud mirrors
the sparrow and the nightingale fly,
feeling the light wet of snowflakes dribble between feathers,
and from the pavement below, she watched them flit
in and out of the marble clouds.

I often wonder about her drunk father
on nights where I can't sleep,
standing at the kitchen sink in half darkness,
watching him shovel snow mounds from their driveway,
seeing the steaming condensation from his breath glow amber.
His ill fitted hat.
Glass stained eyes.
It's easy to forget you were once a boy, a child.

The next afternoon she stands outside on a cleared patch of driveway,
eyes skyward.
How she wished she was a nightingale.

For Matt : Outside the Box

So, my first post isn't my own stuff. It's Matt's! He sent me some images and a slightly drunk explanation (love ya, Matt):

"Here are a few graphics I made to express how we need to redefine the values we have today. Don't think outside the box, destory the box and rebuild it. The other idea is that whatever we call "simple" is always more complicated than we think. I also have some coffee cups intervented by architecture. I am a little drunk so if you need an artist statement let me know. "

Egg

This is a poem I'm working on as a part of a bigger project to write a poem for every letter of the alphabet (each title being a 3-letter, single syllable noun beginning with that letter.) This is E, "Egg," and I'm not sure where to go with it from here. It doesn't feel finished.

The girl knew what it was like to be inside an egg.

She understood the cool gel of the whites,

the smooth curvature of the shell.

She had known stillness in those curves.

The girl had known narrow necks, and brittle ribcages, and the sound

of snapping. She had known teacups,

and wine glasses, and shattering on impact; and she knew

eggshells were harder than they seemed.

The girl slid from the chair to the floor

and pooled on the linoleum, because she knew

eggs tend to slide like that, chair to floor.

By then she had forgotten she had bones.

Tell me about the girl in the egg.

I used to know her, but I find her

sliding between my fingers. She is pooled

at my feet, and I have forgotten what structure

was supposed to hold her up.

Introduction

Welcome to This Thus Far, a place for creative types to share what they make. From the Bloomsbury Group the the Lost Generation, it seems that artists/writers/musicians tend to find each other and influence each others' development. And in our digital era a blog seems as good a place as any to begin this creative dialogue.

This is more a place to workshop than to showcase, so feel free to post what's under construction. There's anxiety about posting work that "isn't finished yet," but this place will work best if it is an interaction.

So let's make some stuff.