Tuesday, November 22, 2011

More Art and a Dying Moth

Fickle creature. Am on to the next Big Thing. At least I am eternally optimistic that my next attempt at drawing will be better than the last. Finished the Parrot Looming Over Woman Dreaming in Red Armchair painting/drawing (is it a painting if paint is not used? This last is a combination of oil/chalk pastel, coloured and graphite pencil). Dropped the finished work into the somewhat bulging art folder along with all the other rejected unframed projects. Have given up on getting anything framed. Buy all these cheap frames with glass at the op shops then leap into a new drawing without measuring first to fit (in case it turns out okay). When I am at my most egotistical (and my most delirious) I have a vision that I'll be *discovered* after my death. Like a modern age Grandma Moses...yet I allow none of the grandkids to call me grandma (whole other post on this, by naming we define, by naming we make real. I will not be named Grandma. Vain, yes. Do I care? No).

So this next drawing was just an exercise to get down an idea I had for a larger piece. But I liked it so much that I've kept going. It's different enough from what I hope to do as a larger work that I won't feel I'm repeating myself. Have much admiration for artists who will do the same painting half a dozen times in an effort to get it right. Admiration that falls short of emulation. Just had a thought tho - stemming from yoga practice. I do the same routine (takes about an hour and 20 minutes) every day. Why does it not bore me? Because each time I am in the moment which is eternal and eternally different. It must follow that if I drew, for example, a brass vase every day for a year, those 365 drawings would be different because I would be different. And perhaps if I did draw that vase 365 times I would discover that it was not boring. One of those great many questions I'll never have an answer to.

There's a moth clinging to the screen in the loo. It's brown and tan, rather bland and nondescript, about the size of a 20 cent piece. I wouldn't have noticed it, as one ignores bland brown moths, except I was sitting there and it was clinging there. Then I saw its translucent wings were somewhat ratty with crenellated edges and of its six legs I could only count two. So this moth is on its way out. What goes on behind those dark unfathomable eyes? Is it aware that it's dying or does it only know great tiredness? Has it bred and therefore will live on in its descendants? Does it drink from the showy cactus flowers which bloom nightly and daily die? What adventures has it experienced under the black eternity of stars while we sit cocooned inside a wooden box mesmerized by a flickering blue glow? The wings have lost most of their *dust*. It has flown...miles? Following the pheronomes of a female or trailing scent like an insect Salome? Dodging predators, guided by what mysterious filaments of knowing that we, with our heavy corporeal intelligence, cannot even imagine. The Night is another dimension, another world. And this moth, holding with one leg to the dusty screen of a country house toilet, the day light shining through its dull brown wings, noticed by one small woman from a crowd of 7 billion, what of it. What of it, indeed?

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