Wednesday, August 26, 2009

variations on a theme, fractal

I can't resist playing soemtimes--AK!

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

process


The second, or lower picture was the "original" for this smudge painting--it came
from a photograph, but I don't know where the original original is.

See variations below.

Farm by Moonlight

Well, these are two of a number of variations I made on this painting.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Fractal Friday Thursday



Playing with fractals from Fractal works. I have no idea why that first one posted fuzzy, very annoying. The original is VERY CLEAR! :-( You can click on it and it will get large and you can see how sharp it is. But you will ahve to scroll around to see the individual shots.

Saturday, August 08, 2009

Painting Grandma 090808

Painting Grandma 090808

Bean tendrils curl like memories, twisting from the tip
of my brush onto the canvas before me.   Clipped crookedly
to the easel, small, bent and dark, an old sepia photo
calls memories of my grandmother into this distant studio.
To please and satisfy the whims of her only granddaughter,
she let skin form on the farina they way I liked it, brewed me
strong coffee at an age my parents called "tender" and "too young,"
sweetened it with cream, sugar and chocolate, warmed me
on winter afternoons with hugs and homemade soup, baked
cookies for me with sweet surprises hidden inside.  And her garden
I remember, and her in it. As she bent to pluck peas or pull weeds,
rolls of her flesh and stocking tops showed below the hems
of her slips and skirts.  I loved the neat perfection of that garden
with its black, glittery soil, and its bounty that filled her pots
and pans, her table, and our bellies.

The dark little photo invades my painting.  Brushed in first,
tumbles of white cotton candy ride brown, flat-bottomed barges
across a brown sea of sky.  I borrowed them from the photo,
too resonant in brown to paint in blue.  Tall beans wind
around rows of poles and pile one onto the next over mounds
of cloud, leaves sepia brown on the bottoms and greening
gradually toward the top.  I paint the photo's dark woman
secure between the rows, round as a snowman in this unlikely
season.  She wears a bib apron, pink with red flowers
over a grizzled blue gingham housedress.  I paint her square face
a tea-stained brown, leathery and wrinkled
as shed layers of sycamore bark. 

As the old photo revives my memories, Grandma
becomes the brightest point in the painting. 
Her grey braids wrap thin around her head and she reaches
heavy brown arms to pluck beans from the plants I paint
before her.  The tips of their leave overlap her reproachful face.
I remember the smile that stern face always turned toward me
and I smile in return toward the small scowl I paint on her lips
and forehead.   "Don't," she warms my father, "Point that camera
at me." Through the shining, iridescent lens in my father's hands,
through more than fifty years of silence, my grandmother cannot see
the granddaughter who with a brush traces the sun-edged clouds,
suggests the light in her eyes, and defines her bean-burgeoning
apron, nor see, beyond me, the great granddaughters and great,
great granddaughters who across five generations touch
her still-damp face with their smiles.
 

Mary Stebbins Taitt
For Nicolina Ciaranello

⇑This line and everything below ⇓ this line are not part of this poem, please ignore.
090808-1648-3i(11), 090721-0856-2, 1st 090719 on back of SMM Ms in pen in car
send this to Maria Mazzotti Gillan (or hand deliver?) for Patterson Review
fresh and green, pot, pan to the easel, small, faded and bent at the edges. Forgotten , dreams creep into my painting, a third thing, not the memories trace, or the photo, but an awkward merging. To visage enhanced bending to

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Firestorms (Desire’s Eyeteeth)

Firestorms (Desire's Eyeteeth)

When venom trickles acid from your lip, I peel
away my remaining smiles, grow my eyeteeth
and go to war.  Wolverine-toothed, sniper-eyed,
and foaming with fire, I mean to make you tremble. 
Your voice ricochets through a throat of stone,
slices me, shrill and sharp as leaky mansion windows. 
Wilted in your anger light, I pour my caustic stare
into your face until my eyeballs scorch
and wither.  You refuse to capitulate.
Beneath each of my skins blows a desert
of windblown sparks, a heart of cinder.
Driven perhaps by astonishment or boredom,
you ask if I would come to bed. I taste the tears
brightening your eyes, the salt
and sorrow of them, and turn away.
Already, I've forgotten which shreds
of your words offended and catapulted me
toward rage.  I wish you held in your hands
first the blossomed fantasy of my truth and then
my face.  Otherwise, whom would you touch
tonight?  Should I drain the moat, swing open
the door to some old remembered mermaid wife
or an invading dream-breasted and antlered witch?
Outside, cicadas whine, drone and parch,
but heat never keeps you from your delightful
and deft desire. Yes, I will come to bed.
We may regret these firestorms we ignite,
but they blaze two ways. Yes, take my hand. 
Your touch soothes me, rouses me, is sweeter,
wiser and hungrier than all these filed yellow
teeth and useless tears strung between us
like broken pearls and opals.



Mary Stebbins Taitt
090805-1800-3h(10), 090804-2047-1b(2), 090804-2038-1st

Sunday, August 02, 2009

Daisies IV

Daisies IV, by Mary Stebbins Taitt, another variation on a theme. I
intend to do more if I can.