Weep for the Dead

On this 4th of July weekend - that celebrates the birthday of a nation who's present government violently pursues its agenda at the expense of ethics, decency and common sense  - I offer this oil pastel/watercolor called Weep for the Dead.

We have taken our freedom and our equality and turned it into a crass, egotistical culture that values Blackwater, Halliburton and their like and lets the poor drown in a flood. That believes valor can be bought.

We are like the British empire of old, we are in decline. Selah.

MIXED MEDIA: pushing the envelope(s)

At the left is a collage of actual pay envelopes from two jobs made for some art class I took somewhere. I can't even remember where or when, though it might have been the Design with Collage class I took at GLSP program at Weseleyan in the late 80s. I have had a lot of trouble deciding which way is up in this piece.

At the right is a digitized rendition of it which I think works better. I like the differing near and far feel of dark and light areas. This work is  not about pay, or mail or society. It's just about shapes in repetition and the way the eye moves through them.

brain center for metaphor found?

Is metaphor an unfathomable enigma to you or to anyone you know? According to research at the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, a small region of our brains may either equip us for metaphor or limit us to literal narration.

According to researcher V. S. Ramachandran, director at the center, a region of the brain dubbed the angular gyrus is most likely partly responsible for the human ability to understand metaphor, according to a May 2005 article that appeared in Science Daily, an online science magazine.

The photo is detail of a mixed media oil painting of mine from long ago. It has hunks of broken  mirror glued on to the canvas board

with hair and pages flying...

Dancing Poems!

For a long while now I have been fascinated with visual art that incorporates text in different ways. With all the leaping going on in this mixed media collage, a lot of the movement here is in the varied angles of the text. The text is actually pages torn from my chapbook Inverse Origami, which are collaged to this canvas, as was the dancer, who was drawn on plain paper in crayon and oil pastel. In addition there is some acrylic paint applied to weave it together.