it's raining. i have the heater on. i painted a small candle for myself and a lawn of alices completely in silhouette, save for the whiteness of their blocky aprons. i began a portrait of Karen Hadaway. i drew until the muscle that connects my shoulder to my neck burned and then i sat back to look. i looked and looked and i picked up Angela Pneuman's book Home Remedies. i flipped it to the middle and read the story i found there- The Bell Ringer. On the 2nd page, i began reading out loud, all the way to the end. longing and heartbreak and confusion and all the fragments. the fragments. swept up in to a pile. a human.
i see sylvia plath and anne sexton in these pages. little flashes of them. but there are other ghosts in there too. other fragments. other inspirations. unknowable things that catch the light, a swift and sudden glint. as i read, my voice went low and slow. each word picking up more weight as it moved. each word becoming more and more laden with history, with all the fragments that make a person who they are. the heavy collection of individuality. of difference. of dark. of familiar places and memories and lost artifacts. the weight of a single life. sad and beautiful. an evidence room but warmer than that. and so much more complex. beauty twisting around flaws and helplessness. or maybe beauty because of these things. i was lost inside the skill of this story. nebulous like a spell.
and when i finished, i looked up at Karen's portrait. a baby. 9 years old. i saw my candle and i saw that it was still raining and i saw that, even here inside the dismal, there is such fertile land for hope and compassion. the possibility for a reckoning.
these texts are an archive of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area from march 2007 - march 2015. it stands as a record of close to a decade of my life, charting the struggles i faced as an artist, daughter, and lover. messy and chaotic at times, eloquent and poetic at others, these texts are an index i am proud of. it was here in this electric box that i learned how to be honest about my experiences and the person i needed to become. it was here that i first learned the truism that words make the world and how to trust such a beautiful, rife, hard fact.
Feb 26, 2010
afternoon
Labels:
angela pneuman,
angela simione,
art practice,
compassion,
karen hadaway,
process,
rainy day,
study
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8 comments:
beautiful words.
After I saw the name Sylvia Likens, I looked up her story. I feel heavy after reading up about such a violence.. :(
thank you, susan. i'm so glad you still stop by. :)
the kid- horrible stuff. the first time i read her story i wanted to throw up.
It's marvelous the way you intermix the visual in your art and the reading and writing Angela, your own and other people's.
You are fortunate indeed.
Angela!
The most wonderful thing about finding a (rare) comment on my blog, is discovering someone like you at the end of it.
Extraordinary!
xxx elle
hi elle! thank you so much! i'm so glad you swung through my neck of the woods!
thank you, elisabeth. i was just thinking the other day how the majority of my artistic influences are writers and i wonder if that's common? i sure hope so. it is such a fertile land of beauty and pain and anger and joy- a book. :)
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