Various Paintings 2009-2010

Some Various works of mine from this past year (2009-2010).

Enjoy.

"Self Portrait" 2010. Gouache on panel.

Bundled and layered in the freezing studio, fall 2009.

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Elm
-----
BY SYLVIA PLATH
-----


I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

A revision of earlier work.

The Brevity of my life was a mere flash
in the cosmic whirlwhind.
Beyond the fracture
I descend
beyond the surface
I’ve pierced
Beyond the silver lining
Collapsing inward
A serpent devouring
It’s own eternity
The tide of emptiness is subsumed back into itself
Lethe is beckoning me once more
I am uncertain
It might be too silty, too brackish
Here I stand on the shore of my own consciousness
The shallow, murky water of time and space
I listen for the call
Fingertips
Needles
Grasping time before me
Useless actions
Don’t look back upon those woods, never
The tree sheds it’s leaves
perhaps indiscriminately
I shed my thoughts here out of necessity
then I collect them in fetal position
Wildfires scorch me in these woods too often
I used to find solace here
Bitter thoughts can take root
if the cold doesn’t take you first

My bones are brittle
years of leaning against the winds
blowing in from the void
Chapping my Eyes, wrists, and mouth
I cannot speak
without cracking some way or another
Sometimes I hear your voice
reverberating in my own
Moving dusty furniture around in my interiority
Asthmatic spasms of recollection

I swim out
fervently thrashing my body against the breaking waves
What does it mean, when my feet are no longer grounded?
As above, so below

Lethe is an ocean
Rivers are too shallow, with some sort of terminus
My mouth is shut
I will not drink

1986-1994: White Light Bled Forth

Tiny arms outstretched to the heavens
Not to the cyan oblivion
Nor absorbing the golden spectrum of the sun
But instead outlining the unobtainable
Blinding pit of the sky.

Wide-eyed, an impressionable mind
I collected fog on the window from hot breath
Blanched light; the color of god, the intangible heavens above me.
The universe, through a child’s eyes
Unstained
Ultimately Neutral
Limited in depth, and paltry in perception
A projection of naivety upon the glass
Bleeding light from my fingertips onto the surface
Revealing a world, with borders not yet resolute
Tracing shadows of the realm outside
Sometimes from the inside out
Sizes of objects indicating some hierarchal order
Of the pure heart and mind.

Sometimes we shut our eyes firmly
The brilliance of the world illuminated
Is too much to bear

In our youth we must first be blinded
Before we turn askance from each other
To see things as they are.
The only true teleology is indifference
And it diverges us, purges us from kinship
It washes away the dust of perception
With the deluge of judgment

Nineteen ninety four
The date I opened my eyes
succumbing to the floodwaters
That filled my body with bleach
and white light at my core
The burden of reality
is quite oft indiscriminate
We pass through the spectrum
and right to the floor of the earth
Side by side
ripped asunder

Cento poem, June 2010


Fallen. From a lofty place
The minor is always the undoing of the major
A tiny fainting spell:
A lapse, a descent, a fall
Intoxication, loss of consciousness, loss of self.
One cannot see any ice near the fire

A fall into self made with the explicit purpose of losing the self in desire
The greatest brightness, short of dazzling, sets near the greatest darkness

Color itself is a degree of darkness
The living strives towards color-
Alcohol drives color away
Color is killed in favor of form
The dream is always on the edge of nightmare

We have no sense of direction; we drift.
An abyss; disorientation, loss of consciousness, descent
Substances appear in color because they have released themselves from the moon-
the sun can give them nothing more
The sky was night, fury, and death; earth is clear sky, sunlight, and warmth
Eyes closed, drugged, unconscious
A gracious woman portrayed naturalistically
is not killed
but murdered
The individual is wanting in judgement
Just as a dream inhabits it’s own proper atmosphere,
so a conception, become composition
Thoughts stand still.

"The More Loving One" W.H Auden ------------------------------------------ Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast. How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me. Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day. Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.

Wonderful