Monthly Newsletter

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#1451 “New Wave” 8×10 acrylic on canvas.

I have a tree painted on the back of my garage with leaves made from pieces of soda cans, stapled loosely so that they rustle delightfully in the breeze.  Against the trunk is painted ‘The wind of change may not blow you someplace different but it might shape you into something more beautiful’. 
I write this on the cusp between the Covid shutdowns and the George Floyd riots.  Many businesses have been shuttered so long they may not survive.  Some have been so impacted by the new health restrictions imposed on reopening, they have given up.  Now we see others burned or looted out of existence and yet others may be unwilling to continue in some neighborhoods. 
I have a friend who has been through several careers.  She describes the changes as getting to a point where she needed to reinvent herself.  This year it seems many will need to reinvent themselves or make adjustments to how they live or work. 
One of the adjustments I’ve been considering is to make some work more easily shippable, so it is less prohibitive to sell online.  I decided to experiment a little with refractured acrylics on canvas; lighter weight than panels, but also a different medium for the refractured part.  The first experiment (above) was relatively successful. 
Another couple items that came out of spending time at home was an update to ‘Busting the Bard’.  This is now available in paperback and kindle from Amazon.  And the fourth poetry and painting book ‘My Next Breath’ is close to being complete. (Click here for links.)  It is available as a paperback but my proofreader and the person writing an intro on the back have yet to have time to do this, so there will be an update hopefully by the end of this week and I’ll create the kindle version then.    I’ll order hard copies once art fairs restart or other outlets need restocking, but if you’d like to get a signed copy let me know.
 
I will have work in two online shows:
Jun 6-Jul 12: 6x6x2020 Online fundraiser for Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Jun 2^nd-Aug 30^th (approx) The Planet of Joy at Lark Gallery Online.  This may develop into a physical gallery show next month and I should be on a Q&A Virtual Art Talk on Zoom soon.  I’ll send another email when this is set.

Sonnet challenge #36

It was inevitable.  At some point someone was going to challenge me to write a sonnet about Covid-19.  Despite my science background, I was mostly inspired by the roadwork at the corner of Highway 86 and State route 22.

Behind the cones

Workers dismissed, how long for, they don’t know.
Equipment lying folded by the street’s
half torn-up surface; they’ve been here for weeks –
the crane, the gravel truck, the red back-hoe,
all wondering if they’re going to start again.
It’s been a month now since the workers left –
something is wrong – the world’s been set adrift
and they are out here rusting in the rain
that’s also started to erode the work
they’ve done so far. Nature takes back the earth
freed from the blacktopl strange kind of rebirth
spawned from the fear of one small viral quirk.
One day when covid-19’s finally gone
the work behind the cones will carry on.

New artwork on Society6

#1220 Theme and Variations. Mixed media on wood. 17″. $230

I just posted “Theme and Variations” on Society6.com this morning.  You can now get this on quite a variety of items.  I personally like it on the tote bag, though its shape is perfect for the clock and stools that they do.

Last month I put up variations on the “One Side” artwork in different languages.  This Link should hopefully take you there, otherwise go to society6.com and search for ‘One Side’.  It comes up among other unrelated images.  If you like it but want it in your language, let me know.  If you’re a fluent speaker on some of the non-English versions and I haven’t done a good job of the translation – let me know, I can fix it!

Let me know if you’re thinking about ordering anything from my Society6.com store – I frequently get discounts sent to me and would be happy to pass them along to you.

 

 

Sonnet Challenge #20

I thought that I would put this one out there today because of all the political huffing and puffing going on presently.  Whatever the rest of the world sees at the international level, I’ve seen (and almost been tangled up in) at the city and county level. <sigh>  One disclaimer – my other half thought in the last two lines that I was advocating such activity.  Seriously, I was just thinking more JFK.  It was a tragedy, but nevertheless didn’t reduce the entire country to rubble.

 

 

Political Machine

A government is such a vast machine
with so many departments interlaced,
it little matters who is on the team –
they are all parts so easily replaced.
It’s easier to just go with the grain
than try to stop this vast unyielding load.
A combine harvester works just the same
and everything before it will be mowed
back into dirt.  Recycled into earth,
ignored, delayed, transgressions found and fined
until the machine has taken all our worth
and then, with welfare, drags us on behind.
And if you blow the president’s head off –
the machine will still continue, with a cough.

Sonnet Challenge #6.

This challenge is another one from Pia in Denmark.  “Current events with a humorous twist.”  I wrote it as things start to get a little heated in North Korea, US has closed two Russian embassies after US embassy staff was reduced in Russia, who are about to conduct battle practices, Syria has become so much of a bar fight I’ve stopped trying to follow who’s fighting whom, and Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk are both predicting world war III will be done by artificial intelligence.  Oy vey and that’s just the stuff I’m paying attention to.

The reference to grayness, by the way is for the dissolution of the tidy black and white of the chess board.  When I wrote this sonnet, I initially did this on paper.  When I went to type it up, I typoed the original ‘Boys will be boys’ and I think it’s one of life’s better typos…..

I’m hoping that the sense of humor that I’ve used doesn’t mean I need to seek political asylum on Alpha Centauri.  (Anyone have the phone # for their embassy just in case?)

Chess
The board of international politics

is getting so much grayer than before.

The pawn, castle and king – war or not war?

What difference does this make to us mere hicks?

We hate our neighbors, but we need to trade,

and then won’t trade because we don’t approve

of how they live and hate.  Our knights outmove

and bishops all expelled, and weapons made

for what? Fists are not how you make a friend!

Boys will be bots, and this is getting dumb!

Is this the “sense” we will base AI on –

the hope and fear that this whole thing will end?

The politics these days are such a mess,

I wish they’d settle it with a game of chess.

A little heavy poetry.

A note:  Where I grew up in Wales, during the Cold War, the time for nukes to reach us from Moscow was supposed to be four minutes.

Range

Within the upturned cerulean cup,
across the Wedgwood blue waves –
the milk-not-plain Chocolate Mountains.
Above, the bright October sun blinds us to
flashes of falling silver
dispensed from those brown-growling speedsters above.
We are too far to see
spiky gray instant clouds scattering
puthers of pulverized sand,
but the earth reports back to us
as shuddering ripples under our feet.

The bombing range is in use today.

It is night time now in another desert.
I wonder if Aleppo hears the gray jets’ approach –
do they carry on with their ecru lives
as do I, under these bombing runs,
wondering if they are in range,
knowing there is no place to hide,
like we carried on under the timescale
of the black cold war,
that four-minute range to white nuclear destruction –
not jet to hear, no future to hold
just gone in sunshine, releasing
the range of emotions we carried with us,
the thoughts and hopes we nevertheless hewed out
in our pastel lives.

But accidents happen within
the rainbow range of human possibilities;
a hop, a skip, a crimson heart beat,
a jumpy peach finger tip and we are all in range
of the friendly fire that
could rain down twenty miles too far west, upending
a Salton City day into the beige earth around us
and the cerulean cup above.

Art vs. Politics.

It’s ok to read – totally non-partisan!

Skyscapes for the Soul Monthly Newsletter, November 2016