She is an oyster, silent at low tide, yet with a host of pearls waiting inside her, ready to be released. When set, she will release those pearls herself, stringing them together, like Chantal’s beads, into a skein of meaningful, enigmatic moments.
Enigmatic, yes, but, like Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a Russian Doll puzzle of secrets and intrigue. Comic book artist, she evolved to graphic designer, then multi-tasked first to Kinetics, and then to a painter who reaches out in empathy to the world around her.
For her, all art is linked and communications are key, on many levels. Visualization. Achievable goals. A step-by-step process with each step foreseen, planned beforehand, and each step always taken with an open mind that accepts the true response, leaving falsehoods behind.
Kinetics, yes, but she is above all a loner. Kayaking. Hiking. Weight-lifting. Yoga. Meditation. Mindfulness. Caring. Sharing. She sends me her web page and I am blown away by her empathy with birds and the natural world, that world her oyster and her, an oyster in that world.
Comment: This particular bird visited our Mountain Ash in the garden at Island View. Kaitlin saw my photo and asked if she could paint it. I sent it to her, and this is the result. Wild life to Still Life to art and never Nature Morte! Together, Kaitlin and I have preserved forever the surprise visit of this beautiful bird.
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Daybreak
… early morning sunshine creepy-crawly spider leg rays climbing over window and wall my bed-nest alive to light not night’s star twinkle but the sun’s egg breaking its golden yolk gilding sheet and pillow billowing day dreams through my still sleepy head …
… the word feast festering gathering its inner glimpses interior life of wind and wave the elements laid out before me my banquet of festivities white the table cloth golden the woodwork’s glow mind and matter polished and the sun show shimmering its morning glory on garden and porch …
Comment: Not every day is the same, nor are the colors the same. Monet would watch the sun crossing the face of Rouen Cathedral. Every hour brought a different set of colours and a changed palette of impressions. No two mornings in the Red Room are the same. Each one presents a changed light, changing moments, changing impressions, but all (or almost all) are unforgettable. The poem, incidentally, can be found in One Small Corner. A Kingsbrae Chronicle (available at this link).
Comment: Another moment of magic: this is the morning of the partial eclipse (Thursday, 10 June, 2021). However, there’s enough cloud cover for me to have missed the actual moments of the eclipse. That said, the sun is all distorted and not at all clear, as it usually is when seen early from the Red Room, nor is it the same rich colors at all, so perhaps I did catch something worthwhile after all. More than worthwhile, this too is a magic moment.
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Dawn at KIRA
A fiery wedge, fierce beneath black-capped clouds, alive the firmament with light, breaking its waves over woods, waters, tranquil the bay, grey, yellow-streaked, then blue, the new day dawning, driving night away, false shadows fleeing.
To rock this new born babe, to swaddle it in a cloak of cloud, disguised for a moment its promise, nature nurturing heart and mind, filling the flesh with memory’s instantaneous flash breaking its light into the dark where no light shone, fearful, the dream world, gone now, dwindling, as day light shafts its arrowed flight.
How thoughtful My Lady who placed me here, at this desk, at this window, at this moment of time.
Glorious, this day-break: words no justice can do to peace and light, this early morning, filtering sunlight through the waking mind, relighting the fires within the heart, and glory a word’s throw away outside this window.
Comment: The poem dates from June, 2017, my first KIRA residency, and can be found in One Small Corner. A Kingsbrae Chronicle (available at this link). The photo, however, dates from this morning, Friday, 11 June 2021, and coincides with my second KIRA Residency. The early morning light in the Red Room is indeed glorious, and the room well deserves its name. The small table by the window overlooking Minister’s Island and Passamaquoddy Bay is a wonderful place for a writer who wishes to create nature imagery based on impressions of light and changing light.
Wake up, sleepy heads, get out of bed and admire the sun as he starts his daily climb. He has left the underworld and his horses have started to draw his chariot on its daily trip up the sky. Look closely, and you can just see the hot breath of their efforts, up there, just above the sun.
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Ginger Marcinkowski (KIRA, August, 2019)
“My walk each morning, rain or shine, feathers my black galoshes with dewy grass. There I would ramble through gated doors that kept out the world and sealed in my pen’s work for that day.
I often found myself sidetracked, exploring paths that led through flowerbeds, and up to my favorite sculptures. I paused to watch my fellow artists as they focused on chosen subjects unaware that I was eavesdropping.
Then silently, I would steal away along the well-trod path to my studio, pausing long enough to greet the llamas and baby goats. If I listen carefully I can still hear their bleating.
In wonder, every day, I climbed the steps of wood that led to my studio, opened the door, and turned to breathe in my good fortune. “What a blessed woman you are,” I would tell myself before taking my place for hours on end at my desk, each moment, each stroke of the pen, each letter added to the growing lines on the page, a gift.”
Comment: I have been writing poems about the KIRA artists as part of my next poetry book, The Nature of Art and the Art of Nature. This is my KIRA2021 project. The Nature of Art is a revision and expansion of a poetry manuscript of the same name that placed second in the WFNB’s Alfred G. Bailey Award (2020). This poem appears in the section entitled Impressions of KIRA Artists. Currently this section contains eleven poems, but it is still under construction. This poem is interesting in that it is a ‘found’ poem, in the sense that Ginger wrote these words to me in an e-mail. I removed them, reordered them, polished them, and sent her back her own poem in her own words. What fun! This should help explain the use of inverted commas at beginning and end, for this poem is spoken in Ginger’s own words.
Visitors Day at KIRA and the artists work in their studios showing their methods and techniques to visitors from the local community and further afield. The mist disappears very quickly and we are left with sunshine and warmth. A good day for sitting out on the porch and waiting for guests.
View from my book table.
I sit behind my table on the porch at KIRA, making notes in my journal and waiting for the advent of guests. I have no plans other than to sit ad write. If people arrive and wish to engage me in conversation, that will be great. It will be even better if they pick up a book, open it, choose a poem or a passage of prose, and allow me to read it to them. They can follow the text while I read. When people do arrive, they look first at the covers of the saddle-stitch books and chapbooks. Many comment on the wonderful pencil sketches that Geoff provided for them. A couple are drawn to the bright colors and cartoons of the larger books. Title and cover combine together to persuade each visitor to pickup a book and start to read it.
Visitor’s view of the book table.
This is more or less what guests and visitors see when they approach the book table. You have to imagine me, the poet, sitting behind that table, masked if I do not know the guests, unmasked and at a safe distance if I do. I find it difficult to read out loud with the mask on. It is much easier, mask off.
I promised one guest, alas, I have forgotten her name, that I would post a poem and a voice recording of it, here on my blog, so that she and her friends could hear me read. This is the poem I read to her. I do hope she is able to locate my blog and follow this up. Here is the poem, from Sun and Moon. Poems from Oaxaca.
Santo Domingo Worshipping Gaia before the great altar in Santo Domingo
If the goddess is not carried in your heart like a warm loaf in a paper bag beneath your shirt you will never discover her hiding place
she does not sip ambrosia from these golden flowers nor does she climb this vine to her heavenly throne nor does she sit on this ceiling frowning down
in spite of the sunshine trapped in all this gold the church is cold and overwhelming tourists come with cameras not the people with their prayers
my only warmth and comfort not in this god who bids the lily gilded but in that quieter voice that speaks within me
and brings me light amidst all this darkness and brings me poverty amidst all this wealth
I will post some of the other poems that I read on the porch over the next few days. Meanwhile, be patient with me. I feel that I am all off-balance, trapped between two worlds, part of me is away in KIRA and part of me is home in Island View. I find it difficult to work on my KIRA2021 project, a rewrite of The Nature of Art and the Art of Nature. This manuscript placed second in the WFNB’s Alfred G. Bailey poetry award in 2020. Since then, I have been revising it and adding to it, with KIRA2021 in mind. However, creating and posting seem to be two conflicting skills right now. The need to express (open blogging) and the need to create (secretive and non-sharing). I hope this helps to explain my irregular postings and my absences from this blog.
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Color and Shape
Waking up to an early morning sky that leaves eyes and mind stained with raspberry juice and blueberries. Night’s vain shadows flee, leaving behind a certain something, a residue of resonance resounding down half-aware corridors unconscious of what they are seeing, unaware of the beauty they have seen. Misty the memories, slipping , sliding into the oblivion of falling back to sleep only to wake to another world, gray scale now, a tissue of cloud and mist and something mysterious, sensed, but not grasped, by searching fingers.
Hard to believe it’s the same room, the same window, the same camera, the same day, the same scene. Clarity, perhaps, but lost the mystery, the nature of that wild rainbow world blessing my waking moments, coloring my dreams, my rapidly dissolving dreams.
I stayed this morning for the KIRA public visits. It was very cold on the back porch and not many people visited. I received four visitors between 10 and 2. However, word will spread and the people will come. Especially if the weather improves. Books above: On Being Welsh, Tales of Tara, McAdam Railway Station, Time Spirits, Lamentations for Holy Week, Land of Rocks and Saints, Obsidian 22, Obsidian’s Edge, and Twelve Days of Cat.
The porch at KIRA: a place to meet, read, write, and display one’s works. What a pleasure to be there. A double pleasure to be invited back.
Books washed up on the Beach, Holt’s Point, NB. Some of the above and a few others. Looking good, as the book worm said when he crawled along the beach for breakfast.
Books in Studio #1, laid out for the visitors, KIRA, June, 2017. So much color, so much hard work.
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Monet at Kingsbrae
Clos Normand and the Grande Allée closed to him. Folded his flowers, their petals tight at his nightfall. Dark their colours, in mourning for his mornings of light, fled far from him now, left way back behind.
The Lady of the Garden holds out her hand, hands him an apple: l’offrande du coeur. A scarlet heart of flame and his world regenerates in roses and in tulips. Especially when the dying sun pours molten fire on a crimson lake.
The limpid sky brims over into low clouds trapping a slash of colour here, and there a tree, a fountain of gold. If the sun is an apple blushing on a setting branch, the money plant hangs silver-white of moonlight between fine-tuned fingers. When it rattles its seeds, coins blunt the moon’s sharp edge, clouds weep, and earth is eclipsed by nickels and dimes.
The breeze bowls clean dry bones across the sky. Wind of change: that first fast bite too bitter to remember and timeless this tide, this ebb and flow, this great pond-serpent coiled around the tree, devouring both tail and tale, dictating itself to death, forever.
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Still Life with Hollyhock for Geoff Slater the inventor of line painting
How do you frame this beaver pond, those paths, those woods? How do you know what to leave, what to choose? Where does light begin and darkness end?
Up and down: two dimensions. Easy. But where does depth come from? Or the tactility, the energy, water’s flow, that rush of breathless movement that transcends the painting’s stillness?
So many questions, so few answers. The hollyhock that blooms in my kitchen is not a real hollyhock. It is the painting of a photo of a genuine flower that once upon a time flourished in my garden.
A still life, then, a nature morte, a dead nature, portrayed in paint and hung alive, on display in this coffin’s wooden frame.
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