Junk Mail Art: Recurrent Dream

When did the laughing begin?  the door is like a mirror:  you see yourself.  The dream face opens a window and draws you into a world that endlessly circles.  I mirror you in images that don’t exist yet.  When did the laughing begin?  The door…

Jane Dougherty’s microfiction challenge this week includes the painting above and the theme “who goes there?”.

Who indeed?

Cave

Mistaking the shadows for dragons,
I hesitate.  Deep primal fear
meets concentrated dark.  What
waits at the center?  What
treasures surround the
unconscious heart?
Surrender
inside
out.

For Sue Vincent’s Thursday Photo Prompt, cave, above.

Summer Storm

open the sky
sound and silence in brooding light
open the sky
windsong cloaked in turbulent cry
disappearing into false night
thundered echoes flashing black white
open the sky

Jane Dougherty’s poetry challenge this week was the rondelet form, with the theme “summer storm”, accompanied by the photo below.

I think August still has a few of these left.

 

Hands

Pause at the edges
to consider endings.  Lines
as divined proof.  Lines
becoming soothsayers.  Lines
watching and recording time.

The 25th of each month has been, on and off, selfie day, so I’ve been aiming to finish the self portraits for my series then.  I’m not even close this month, but Charlie at Doodlewash has been sponsoring a favorites month, and today is, appropriately, “favorite body part”.  The eye is certainly tempting, but the hands win out.

I realized as I was doing this that I haven’t really been drawing much at all for awhile.  Perhaps these hands will get me going again.  I did the right hand with the left hand holding the pencil, and the left hand with the right hand holding the pencil, not lifting the pencil from the page.  Palms still seem easier to draw me than the back of the hand.

The poem uses the secret keeper’s words this week:
WATCH | EDGE | PROOF | PAUSE | SOOTH

Junk Mail Art: Animal from Oaxaca

shed light in the dark
now imagine    choose your world
belong to someone

I found a wonderful children’s alphabet book at the library called “ABeCedarios”.  It’s illustrated with brightly painted animal sculptures made by the Jimenez family of Oaxaca, Mexico, which I’ve used as references to make some creatures in collage.

Poem courtesy of my collage box oracle.

Synapses

“And then, all at once, my God, the box was full of stars.”
–Helen Macdonald, “H is for Hawk”

Matter or
mind?  Images caught,
returning,
unchecked by
the body that is my brain–
synapses on fire.

Macdonald is talking about seeing her hawk, but that sentence made me think of the brain, and the images I had seen of synapses at work.  You can give me a scientific explanation of how signals traveling those pathways become something I see, or imagine, but it’s still magic to me.  Like birds.  Like stars.

Prompt image from Sue Vincent.  We’re always filling in the blanks.

Junk Mail Art: Grace of Light

Jane Doughtery proposed a fairy tale journey in her microfiction challenge this week, involving a child and a golden city.

Like the child, I had no idea what was really beyond the mountains until I got there.

I do seem to be prone to finding these rifts in the world…

For Nina

Magnetic Poetry Saturday: Hold Hope

The oracle was generous to us this week.  A three-way collaboration: O.N.K.

hold hope open
my promise to trust
a thousand worlds receive
this spirit
listen to the gifts
of your heart
where gentle rhapsodys live

Dancing in the Moonlight

A riff on yesterday’s moon painting. I painted the entire paper with purple gouache and ink mixed together and did the moon and dancing figures in silver gouache. The blue was applied and dripped on afterwards.