Two distant skies cover hopes united by noble commitment. The attractive conviction settles in the memory and encourages the shared future. To be one in this chaotic transit and capture the inevitable reunion, there is the powerful meaning
the gift of time oil on canvas 70x50cm 2022
In the unknown, we met In hope, we agree In conviction, we unite and dream In determination, we project We have been laughing and crying, breath and fatigue, shared flavors and we share sounds. I saw you dance and I met my longest smile. I heard you sing and I knew I already have a new motto. And now I’m going up to new heights, where the brushstrokes stand out, and claim their chimera. The time will be long enough to plant that immersed ideal what we have to go through
Kaslarin Karasina: For the Darkness of your Eyelashes oil on canvas 60 x 50 cm. 2021
This work is inspired by the song of the same name by the Turkish musician Beynelmilân. In this painting I wanted to reflect the energy of the person portrayed, her gaze reflects a mystery that allows various interpretations
REsIgnifiKance (detail) oil on canvas 140 x 125 cm. 2022
A call in the language of stars a blind search paid off. reviving convictions reincarnated in songs. Five phases of illusions and another five of dilemmas. fears are not noticed when promises bloom…
Chena trails Pens on canvas 60x100cm. 2016
This drawing is the first one I made with the “Chromatic Story” technique. It is inspired by the experiences and omens that I experienced during the almost 8 years that I lived near Chena Hill, a place full of inspiration and history.
Felipe López Osses is a self-taught cartoonist and painter born in Linares, Chile. His foray into art began in his childhood, when he began to develop his creativity and work with many details. In his works he mainly uses ballpoint pens and oils. His inspiration comes from nature and music. In 2015 he began to work with his own technique: pens on canvas, a technique to which he gave the name “Chromatic Story”, since it is “an invitation to the viewer to take a detailed tour of the details and symbolism, encouraging their own interpretation of the work
The certainty about our origin is in the bones. 21st-century Surrealism seeks universality while understanding the mind. We aspire to explore inner space together. From caves, dream temples, and pyramids of antiquity to the temporal lobes in our brain, our movement is a collage that devotes serious effort to be sympathetically aware of connections between ourselves and the collective unconscious.
Mitchell Pluto
𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟮𝟲 𝘁𝗼 𝗝𝘂𝗹𝘆 𝟮𝟬, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟮 Over the past forty years, in the Middle East and various places in the world, Surrealism was considered as a past artistic movement and confined to limited artistic icons. And yet, in the meantime, Surrealism was constantly evolving and developing its tools and philosophy to free human imagination, where the mental play of imagination through art and literature remains the most fundamental activity.
photo of Ghadah Kamal Ahmed by Mohamed al Kashef
In the continuation of the contemporary surrealist wave in Egypt and the Middle East, and after the International Exhibition of Surrealism held in Cairo from 15 to 19 February 2022 as the start of a round trip / Cairo – Saint Cirq Lapopie. Based on the wonderful energy achieved with its success, the idea of continuing the adventure in Alexandria was born from the collective work of surrealists from Egypt, France and all over the world.
Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism – Maze of Dreams and Games which includes displaying a wide range of artworks, music, surrealist films, visual arts, and practicing surrealist collective games during the exhibition with workshops on collective surrealist creative techniques and games created from 1924 until today. In conjunction with the Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism Exhibition in Alexandria, on June 15, the same events of the exhibition and workshops will be organized, as well as other events that will be hosted by art space and square simple garden In Budapest, the opening will coincide with the opening of the exhibition in Alexandria on June 8.
Mohsen L Belasy
“Drink wine and look at the moon and think of all the civilizations the moon has seen passing by.” ― Omar Khayyám
The essential for a Zen painter means a manner of being in the deepest sense and not, as for us, a manner of doing. For them it means fusion in the life of the cosmos…
Andre Masson
The 3 Echoes:Ghadah Kamal Ahed, Fairouz Eltaweela and Mohsen L Belasy
“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.” ― André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism
“I was interested in other spaces to do with forms drawn from non-Euclidean geometry and the idea of entering these spaces. These structures do not rely on the sense of space, as we know it. It is a space without limits and which transforms itself in time – a mutant space.”
– Roberto Matta, in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, April 2001
“the principle which controls magic, and the technique of the animistic method of thought, is “Omnipotence of Thought.” ― Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein
A brief sample of visual artist participants of Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism Alexandria /Exhibition
Mohsen L BelasyOdy SabanShahd ElkhouliIrene PlazewskaJaime Alfaro NgwaziEnrique de SantiagoMagdalena BenaventeMitchell Pluto
Daniel O’Reilly Soundtrack Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism /Alexandria 2022
‘Masks of the City’ – La Sirena‘s contribution to the 15 minute smartphone film challenge for Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism Exhibition. Shown in Budapest and Alexandria. Darren Thomas, Doug Campbell Tara King, Elliott H. King, Janice Hathaway, Irene Plazewska, Patrick Hourihan, LaDonna Smith, Christine Haller, Clém Gslr, Daina Almario-Kopp
Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism Freudian Slip: Interpretation of Dreams and a Labyrinth of Surrealist Expression videographer by Maria Gyarmati music by / LaDonna Smith and Daniel O’Reilly editing by / Mohsen L Belasy Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism—Freudian Slip: Interpretation of Dreams & Labyrinth of Surrealism Budapest Surrealist Society Echos du surréalisme contemporains افتتاح معرض جماعى عن الاعمال السريالية وعروض افلام
Echoes of Contemporary SurrealismPosters by Ghadah Kamal Ahmed
How would you describe your painting process and your associative relationship between concepts, events, or mental states of the subconscious? Is there a link between self-hypnosis and inspiration?
Artists, writers, and poets such as Garcia Lorca, Roberto Matta, Henri Michaux, and even Anais Nin have inspired me to paint. Language, for me, comes first, but the visual can support the verbal. I paint as if I’m composing poetry.
Automatism or improvisation is the starting point – bebop – but I’ve realized that the contours of a, often dismembered and re-stitched, female body appears repetitively in my mind’s eye: think Mary Shelly. This flickering of fragmented body parts leaves deposits on the canvas/my mind. There’s something about the human body that truly fascinates me. This fascination isn’t deliberate, and it’s also strange because I’m more cerebral than a physical person: in my view, the body exists only in the mind. This also solves, at least for me, the century-old dualism: the body-mind split. Or, as William Blake said: “the body is a portion of the soul.”
Man is a machine, and a woman is a sublime machine. If you compare the human and the animal body, the human body is clearly synthetic and artificial. It blurs the boundaries between what’s considered natural and what’s considered artificial. I find that thrilling. There’s nothing natural about us humans. We aren’t becoming robots or cyborgs, we already are. We can’t rely on our instincts anymore as non-synthetic creatures can. There are vehicles in the making that’ll be able to reproduce themselves with whatever material they can find on Mars.
How’s that different from us? You could say that humans think and feel, but do we really? Aren’t we just parroting the words, stories, and belief systems that we’ve been fed? When was the last time you heard a new idea? Something you hadn’t heard before, something that stimulated an innovative thought. We’re the protein by-product of language. Perhaps when there’s trance, a moment of silence, or jazz, an intelligent intuition can unfold in the nerve domain. Painting or poetry can help it develop, transmit and circulate. Possibly it can be fertilized by critical reading or meditation.
Is painting a technique that represents a body disconnected from words? a sort of ‘transmuting neurology’
Transmuting neurology, I love this phrasing. Probably our neurology is in constant a state of desire for perpetual transmutation, but the culture must allow for it. Studying the history of painting, I was excited to learn that the Impressionists had “discovered” different shades in snow, something that nobody had “seen” before them. Isn’t that intriguing? I guess they contributed to an alteration of the general perception and experience of what’s “white.” They are also depicted as the very first in the history of Western painting of social situations such as people dancing or swimming. Nobody had done that before them. That’s why the establishment was so scandalized.
Of course, it didn’t help that the women they painted often were what today we’d call sex workers. Can you imagine that in the second part of the 19th century? Later with expressionism and surrealism, painters gave expression to the ebb and flow of what’s inside the mind’s eye. An interesting artist is Francis Bacon. He claimed that he depicted people as they “really” are. Perhaps some of us are polished yet monstrous or disfigured? Or even, maybe the human condition is one of perpetual disfigurement? Whether we can see without words is something I keep on mulling over. I feel tempted to believe that as humans we need some sort of narrative or linguistic frame of intelligibility to see things. Perhaps we can only perceive objects contextually. Painters should be called pioneers or even anarchists of perception.
Can you elaborate on how language shapes us by a Languaged body, cultured intuition by sound, and language as a living intelligence?
I’d like to emphasize that I constantly toy with intuitions and ideas, not with truths. The truth for me often is a reductionist and particularly violent concept. Think of all the wars that have been fought over some sort of revelatory divine truth, or in later centuries, the so-called scientific truth. The Nazis had their ideology backed up by scientists’ assertion that theirs was the most evolved race (so-called Social Darwinism), and that certain other races were particularly parasitic and had to be exterminated the same way as rats or cockroaches. So, circling back to the central ideas informing my practices such as the “languaged body” which is a neologism, and the idea that language is a living intelligence, I don’t consider them to be truths. These are frames of intelligibility that have grown under my skin over the years of study, reflection, practice, and meditation. I have no problem admitting that these concepts are nothing more than my obsessions. I’m not a missionary.
I see language as something external to human beings, possibly an organism. In the process of language learning, humans are inserted into this external thing we frivolously call language. There are linguists in Switzerland who’ve developed a theory in which language is a symbiont. So not necessarily a virus as William S Burroughs famously claimed, or that it can turn parasitic in case of psychosis as French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan suggested. I see our brain + nervous system as a receptor-like radio, tv, or computer, capable of receiving signals and building narrative. In some way, it’s a form of telepathy. By producing sounds, we invoke a whole shared world that has been forged across thousands of generations. Also, we invest our lifeworld, including our bodies, with words, with a story. If our bodies weren’t invested with language, we’d constantly experience ourselves and others as walking talking meat, protein bags, or water bags on legs. When we buy meat at the butcher’s or supermarket, we don’t think of that red stuff as chopped-up dead animal cadavers. We say it’s a New York strip or whatever. Something similar is going on with our bodies. We have names.
This name is somehow “written” on our skin, on our face. I’ve never met anyone without a name, though I’m curious how that’d be. When we feel attracted to someone, we don’t think “that’s a tasty animal.” Some of us might, however. A whole story about someone is activated within us when we fall in love, a concept of what a human being is, of what beauty is, etc. while we all know that a few millimeters under the skin there’s blood and a skull. But who, except a cannibal or a serial killer, thinks about that? The way language has contextualized humans prevents us from seeing the meatiness of a person. But this experience isn’t fixed. There are cultures in which not everyone has human status. Think of the Dalits in India. In Central Africa the so-called pygmy is being hunted and eaten, most probably because their appearance doesn’t conform to the hunter’s concept of what constitutes a human. It’s also interesting to read the private diaries of people who worked in concentration camps, and how they thought about the people they helped butcher or exterminate. Some agreed that Jews, homosexuals, communists, etc. had to be put to death, but they felt it should happen in a kinder way, pretty much how some activists think about animal rights in our era.
Language protects us by feeding us optical illusions. As humans, we’re trapped in a theater of distorted thoughts. It’s as if we need to drive on a busy freeway wearing glasses deforming everything coming our way. All this is extremely disorienting and frightening. I think maybe that’s why there’re so many ideologies and why religion is such a sensitive matter. These “grand narratives” offer the illusion of certainty and direction: how one should lead one’s life, where one should be headed, and where to invest one’s life force. The artist, I think, has been for whatever reason cast out of the Eden of ideology or religion, and is forced to constantly mold and remold her internalized worldviews, knowing often very well that this is a futile endeavor that must be repeated endlessly. But, at least, there’s some motion within. The alternative would be catatonia.
Artists, writers, and poets who helped contribute and inform your process?
I sound like a broken record when I keep on mentioning Will Alexander. But there’s no denying that his oeuvre provided me with the missing link in my thinking. I have always had an interest in ritual, animism, and shamanism, but with the latter term, we need to be extremely careful. I adhere to academic concepts of shamanism, such as Mircea Eliade’s. When younger I participated extensively in groups believing that they were engaged in shamanic practices. Perhaps some of those did. I don’t want to claim that I have the capacity to say what’s authentic and what isn’t. What I inherited from these experiences is the sensation of trance. Will’s work transfuses both language and animism/shamanism, especially in his The Combustion Cycle.
Without trance, there’s no writing nor painting for me. Writing prose is different. Poetry and painting for me fall in the same domain as glossolalia, speaking in tongues or trance-speaking. Freudian associating on the couch. Will’s concept of language as a living, possibly alchemical intelligence, makes a lot of sense to me. It connects my interest in shamanism and animism with my obsession with language in a no-nonsense way. WA’s poetics is a conscious journey into the imagination. To truly feel this, you need to understand that the imagination isn’t just “fugazi” or fantasy. The Jungians know very well that the imaginal world is a tangible environment, in which one can move around and travel in. There are beings dwelling there. You can develop a bond with these inorganic characters. Jungian practitioners are aware of this possibility.
I think I can say that Occidental culture at this point in history is in a state of coma or autophagy: it’s eating itself up. The criteria for personhood are so one-sided and reductionist that it is extremely easy to descend into a state of being a non-person. Maybe the only option when that happens for some people is to die and, in the process, drag along as many corpses as possible. Ours is a high-risk society. Having said that, I’ve lived in India for three years the comfortable life of an adult literature student. Life in India is no bargain either. Perhaps I have taken shelter in the written word and painted images because I’ve experienced that it isn’t possible to change your own culture with another. Every culture has its own cruelties, sacrifices, and gains, but they aren’t commodities. The difference, maybe, between Western cultures and the rest of the planet is that, as French novelist Michel Houellebecq suggests, the West has sacrificed almost everything for the sake of rationalism and technocracy.
There are also other artists and poets besides WA that have influenced me. I’m thinking of the “Grand Jeu” poets such as Rene Daumal and Gilbert-LeComte but also Antonin Artaud, Joyce Mansour, and Roberto Matta. Regarding US artists and poets, there’s, of course, Philip Lamantia, whose thinking and work is like a direct mind-injection into my mind: picture a metaphysical phone call without ever hanging up. Other important people would be Bob Kaufman, John Hoffman, Laurence Weisberg, but also someone like Mina Loy, and some beats, in particular William S Burroughs. I feel a deep affection for a lot of artists and writers: William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Thom Burns, Rik Lina, Byron Baker, Emily Dickenson, Edgar Allan Poe, William Blake, Lautreamont, Guiliaume Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gerard de Nerval, Grace Hartigan, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Juanita Guccione, and many more.
Bill de Kooning deserves special mention, on the one hand, because nobody speaks about him anymore and because of ongoing the “de Kooning-bashing. But also because my paintings are a prolegomenon (not a counter-narrative) to his disfigured depictions of Marilyn Monroe-type of women, in particular the teeth: Where else in the world is the business of smiling taken so seriously as in the USA? My series of chopped-up disfigured ladies, “Mutilated Madonnas,” are homage and homologous to his.
This is intense work. It’s incandescent. It’ll catch your eyes on fire. Burn your brain down. Giorgia Pavlidou has managed to make anguish appear beautiful. And sexy. Artaud is the tutelary spirit of this work. The anguish is real and the words have the taste and smell of the netherworld in its black gown of sibilant pupa. This is language with a biology; it writhes, hisses, and propagates by glossolalic impregnation. Reading these poems is an immersive experience. Here we find madness, anguish, erotica and Rabelaisian humor welded and wed to a language full of “lexical tentacles” and “fire dressed in fire.” It gets under your skin, this speech. These strangely intelligent & autonomous words, manic as wasps in a vessel of glass.
—John Olson
A pyrotechnics of lingual essence, Giorgia Pavlidou’s “inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel” yields feeling through the language of the heart creating darkened constellations that rivet the inner eye all the while whirling as an estranged yet organic imaginal terrain.
—Will Alexander
Giorgia Pavlidou
Giorgia Pavlidou is an American writer and painter intermittently living in Greece and the US. Her work recently appeared or is forthcoming in Caesura, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Clockwise Cat, Ocotillo Review, Strukterriss Magazine, Entropy and Sun & Moon Magazine. She’s an editor of SULΦUR. Additionally, Trainwreck Press launched her chapbook ‘inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel’ in 2021, and Anvil Tongue Books her full length book of poems and paintings, ‘Haunted by the Living – Fed by the Dead’ in May 2022
Every time I ordered my papers I found these poems that correspond to my years of militancy in the communist youth under the period of the dictatorship, which in my personal case took place between 1979 and 1989
Already a couple of years ago, around 1977, my concern for writing verses had been awakened, and I still have those first poetic stammers. Those sheets speak of those attempts to provide something different to the word, since when adding two, these would give a different meaning and significance, more subtle, in short, that it had a broader meaning.
I had finished high school, and shortly after I met a landscape painter and an art student, who showed me the secrets of easel painting, it was then that I was already clear that my destiny was the visual arts. Parallel to the instruction, I received from these two friends, others close to the cultural circle that was forming in the neighborhood, they enlightened me about the dark passages that happened daily in our country. There was the coup d’état, the intervention of the United States, the disappeared detainees, the torture, the prison and the political persecution, which were some among many the prison, and the political persecution, which were some of the many atrocities that devastated our people.
poetry was still present, and names like Nicolas Guillen, Ernesto Cardenal, or Roque Dalton had been added to my library. I wrote in my spare time, and much of that poetry served the cause of the offended and their fight for liberation for the construction of a new, fairer life. It was then, during a sunny winter afternoon that one of my friends invited me to join the Communist Youth.
I accepted and from that moment my new name was Freddy. The following year he entered the Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile, where the student agitation had restarted after complex years where the repression was brutally violent. Now there were more of us and all the universities were setting up Student Centers ready to fight for student and human rights. They were two hard years, of strikes, street actions, propaganda, and confrontation with the repressive forces-Carabineros de Chile, which at that point was a militarized police force trained for repression-Between art classes, paintings, and struggle, of from time to time some of these poems that I have rescued arose. Others were lost among notebooks or were forgotten on a table in my school.
The months went by one after another; meeting, bells, protests, repression, hiding and reappearing, that’s how the years went by, with a lot of political activity, little appearance, and some verses that are being accommodated in these sheets.
At the beginning of 88, love came with force, since one day in January I met Valezka, who would be the mother of my three beloved daughters. That year, party activity would turn to the campaign for the October plebiscite and find a way to insert myself into the workplace, since by December there would be three of us in the family. It was a tough year for both of us, but we went to all the big marches where we joined the people who had said enough to so many people of darkness and opprobrium. The triumph of the “No” option brought hope for the daughter to come and the verses changed color, approaching a less arid and somber texture. 1989 I arrive with a stable job, my party life is focused on the union. That year Patricio Aylwin was elected, he would be the President “as far as possible”, or put another way: what was impossible for the people, while everything possible was given to the de facto groups and the oligarchy. Those were the years of asking for permission from the dictators and fascists who held key positions in the Armed Forces, Parliament, and the production and communication media. Large state companies continued to be privatized and neoliberalism deepened. From the 90s onwards, were the years of shame, of a protected democracy, and of the deepening of the model
Enrique of Santiago, December 2021
The Smoke Base (1979)
the base of the smoke it is base without eye for the bell a lock vibrates ten times, and the bewildered sight writes How many broken ideas are there in the mirror? for the bell the ear is deaf with pain of 10,000 years the crazy race has an end everywhere lips are pursed, the exit is praised, spitting black earth and the black earth spits us to the sky burning the pupils since the base of the smoke has no eye The base of the smoke has no eye and the ash drowns a siren and they crash by the thousands Well, it’s the autumn of man the bell screams in fright and the eardrum tells him to shut up.. but the cry is crying dog crying, of worms of mice human crying shoes melt and the frost boils in its hour pine is charcoal and the race burns and burns The base of the smoke has no eye but the beginning yes, but underlies its lock
Carnival and duel (1980)
Dreams have been trampled in the mud and the moans are silenced with screens and neon fun to lead the century on the trembling of absent birds but one day the crystal clear rain will come and after the sun with your new water kissed by the moon while the rebellious ligaments they give off longings on the gray asphalt under waiting stars the smooth flight of lepidoptera
The Pedaling (1981)
On a colorless bike pedal to a sleeping atoll in that corner of the skin of a rosy vision under the dark green chair so that the sole kisses the yellow sands the contemporary chip already inside my starry pants I think it is appropriate to say with a red voice: Long live this surreal expression! I then say: Your violet rifle jumps from the dark tides Stepping on the shapes that you don’t have yet and you were submerged in your numerical sea where they surprised you between mastabas and whips and embraced the heavy centuries under the belly of the galleys to cross the maps of the centuries chasing the useless and ephemeral
Night (1983)
Have you felt that the bats They come to your room one day agitated? They laugh and denote expired fangs while the music falls, abandoning each note, and I look for an onomatopoeia to simulate my brain hitting the floor, so as not to perceive how it is extinguished the spent life of those who do not have feathers I just want my fingers intact to pull a certain trigger and make my way through the gray tangle of his name
Observations (1984)
They are cloudy days vermin crawl and abound the palace beasts the city wears its best corruption suit and in each office a crime is perpetrated but there are still your kisses and your moisture in a brief but broad sincerity in that street that corrects my face and faith
Reading in Heaven (1985)
The fly refrained from ascending and stopped at folded hopes perceiving a usual odor had drilled all the diameters known and unknown of the present medieval apathy Repelled by bullets the nonconformity wears black tile and resume the flight causing the last ulcers to existing weight Tomorrow the cage is undressed before the soup gets cold
Painting (1986)
Alone, in front of the support clinging to thousands of flaming voices and be one and all following the thread of Ariadna in that challenging labyrinth where she is shipwrecked and pales her life, next to the truth and hers custodian loves be both and call what principle Without us realizing that we always carry with the fear of what ends
Dream (1987)
In the courtyard of my memory I did not pave stone *pastelones and on the most humid and fertile land grow a red flower burdensome and geometric without the language of capitulation and got up watered with the brief bravery that drives almost irrationally to the martyrs from every barricade in this city charnel house
Demystifying (1987)
The feather vortex perishes before the litigation of stillness and from so much looking for potions on nights covered with the moon shell I then went to the annals of oblivion while the image of the eroded sky appears under the uncertainty of its dim flashes going through the rubble of your memory My withered pupil arrived there to forget you
September Notes (1989)
They will hide my lean meat, under the cover of earth and parallel, where the traces left by my dreams will not be visible in those coordinates where the dragonflies nested In the softest parts of a solstice insistent the consecrated spells will be hidden for future generations while I drink from a larval porphyria since each wing contains the history of time, what takes my breath to set your levels without further limits that the one that extends in the red slope of a fallen where each segment of the man fulfills with the fragility of his own destiny In vain many look at their savings account on the gray sidewalk, when in reality life goes by insignificant before your eyes Now do you understand why? of the sound of crafty sabers in spring
Enrique de Santiago, Born in Santiago, Chile (1961). Visual artist, poet, researcher, essayist, curator and cultural manager. He studied a Bachelor of Art at the University of Chile and at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Chile). Since 1984, he has exhibited in individual and group exhibitions, counting to his credit around more than 100 exhibitions. He has edited five books: Fragile Transits Under the Spirals in 2012, with La Polla Literaria; Elegía a las Magas and the book essay: El Regreso de las Magas, both with Editorial Varonas. In 2018 he edited La Cúspide Uránica with editorial Xaleshem and Dharma Comunicaciones, and Travel Bitácora with Editorial Opalina Cartonera. He has participated in various poetry anthologies, both in Chile and abroad. He has collaborated in the newspaper La Nación with articles on new media art, and in magazines such as Derrame, Escaner Cultural and Labios Menores in Chile, Brumes Blondes in Holland, Adamar from Spain, Punto Seguido from Colombia, Sonámbula from Mexico, Agulha de Brazil, Incomunidade de Portugal, Styxus de Rep. Czech, Canibaal de Valencia, Spain, Materika de Costa Rica and other printed and digital publications.
Where does the inspiration come from to paint vivacious ‘swollen icons’ or Zaftig female figures?
My inspiration to create these characters comes from beautiful Trauma. I had a sexualized childhood and have very vivid recollections of intense moments that shaped my life and artistic aesthetic. My voluptuous women are inspired by the Latin women I grew up seeing around me and fantasizing about. The male characters are inspired by the feelings I have experienced when I see a powerful woman. The source of my creativity is the power of femininity. I call my male characters SWOLLEN ICONS because I feel that when men are aroused they swell spirituality and physically. The feeling of blood flow from excitement inspired me to express myself and create these unique figures. They are also inspired by a memory of a deformed boy I saw back when I was 7 years old. His image is imprinted in my mind and somehow it pours into my work. One of the strongest memories that have shaped my art happened when I was a pre teen surfing in Miami Beach. While I surfed in small shore break waves a gorgeous tanned Brazilian woman approached me and asked if I could teach her how to surf. When she laid down on my surfboard I looked at her muscular and plump derriere and time seemed to stand still. She was wearing a thong and was flirting with me. She was an older married woman and was just having some fun, but for me it was serious. That memory inspired my inclination for zaftig female figures and bubble butts. Most of my work is highly personal and evolve daily experiences. And the pain and melancholy in my work is due to youthful unrequited love.
There is a strong Freudian id theme in your work have you read any Sigmund Freud? Cal Jung? what are your views on sexuality and art?
Yes, I have read and studied about them. When I graduated high school I wanted to be a psychologist. I did 4 years in college and when I was about to graduate Psych school I had a change of heart and pursued art. In the end I graduated with a major in visual arts and a minor in psychology. They were very influential to my creative process. Because of them and the surrealists I started delving into my memories to create. I loved that they gave importance to the private worlds in our subconscious. I love sexuality and sensuality; some of the greatest works of art have been driving by this primal force. I think sexuality is beautiful and powerful. I don’t see it as a sin but as a gift, the ultimate feeling in the world has to offer us. It’s the source of creativity and life. A perfect example of how the power of sexuality inspired art and helped change the world was Picasso’s “Les demoiselle D’Avognon”. That painting became the face of an art revolution that led to modern art and it was inspired by the women in a brothel. Picasso once said that sex and art are the same, I agree.
There is an infant, a consort often accompanying your female figures, who is he?
That figure is usually a self portrait. He represents the way I feel. When there are more than one of these little figures its usually a statement on society, the male condition. That’s the simple way to talk about them but I feel these characters have several layers and can signify many things, it all depends on the viewer. Sometimes this character is a SWOLLEN ICON and sometimes he can be a HYBRID. The hybrids in my work represent animalistic urges. One of my favorite painters is Bosch and I look to his array of menacing hybrids are inspiration for these thought process. My paintings can symbolize emotions but at the same time can be read as social commentary.
How do you process ideas from the subconscious and find inspiration on a daily basis?
I like to create art through the surrealist practice of automatism. I let the work unfold before me as work without conceptual restraints and flow with the material I am using. I love the initial process of discovery and uncertainty. Sometimes I am inspired by a dream or an experience and choose to try and capture that vision. But most of the time I prefer to work intuitively. I have coined the word SENSUALISM as my art style because it is heavily influence by surrealism and sensuality. I love art history and I feel my work is in constant dialogue with past art.
Were there other writers made a major influence on the way you thought about reality?
I love the works by existential writers the likes of Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, Oscar Wilde, Kafka, Bukowski and Nabokov. Oscar Wilde’s book “A picture of Dorian Grey’ is forever inspiration for me. He was one of the first artists that showed me that one could create great art by exposing subconscious desires and fears. I also love the book “Narcissus and Goldmund” by Herman Hesse. In this book I love the way Hesse poetically depicts the life and struggles of the visionary artist. Besides loving books I am also a huge film buff. I love all genres. I find inspiration seeing and taking notes while I watch great films. My favorite filmmakers are David Lynch, David Cronenberg and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Some of my favorite all time films are; THE ELEPHAT MAN, AMADEUS, ROCKY, SANTA SANGRE and LEGEND. I also wouldn’t be able to create without music. I love creating while jamming to my favorite bands. I love the energy in heavy metal, punk rock and retro new wave; bands like Audioslave and Metallica keep me stoked while I work.
Favorite artists?
My favorite artists are Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Jan van Eyck, Robert crumb, Ingres. If you look carefully you will see their influence in my work. They have heavily informed my art through the years. I have actually seen Their work in person and have been changed by it. I can remember the time my wife and I took a trip to Paris to visit the Louvre museum and I was blown away the art of Jan Van Eyck. I stood in front of one of his oil paintings for an hour, mesmerized and touched by the sheer technical prowess. When I got home from the trip I decide I wanted to paint like him and dedicate my life to the love of color, sensuality and care.
What can you tell us about your spirituality of surfing and staying healthy?
I have been surfing on and off since I was a child. To me surfing is a way to connect spiritually with nature and the higher power. Surfing is so pure and freeing, it nourishes me every time I go for a session. This feeling can be very addicting and dangerous so I have to limit my time in the water or I can get consumed by it and not get work done. I grew up in Miami Beach. I lived very close to the beach and have hung out most of my life there. All of my art is inspired by the culture of abundance and excess I witness on a day to day living here. One of my favorite paintings I have created was inspired by an accident I had surfing. The piece is called Broken Mirror and I painted it while I was recovering from a broken nose. I put all the pain and beauty I felt for life at that moment in that painting. It now hangs in my home as a reminder and it is my prized possession. After that accident I stopped surfing for a few years but I couldn’t stay away for long. Now I can say that my love for surfing is back and is stronger than ever. Surfing has given me some of the most beautiful memories and frightening moments in my life, I learn from it constantly. When I was very young my sister Giuliana bought me my first surfboard, she was the reason I began surfing, I think she believed that surfing would keep me out of trouble and help me find an identity. She was right. When she died on of cancer a few years ago I promised her that I would surf for her. So nowadays I don’t just surf for pleasure but also to keep her memory alive.
JC Bravo
I work primarily with oil paints. It is important for me to achieve a jewel like preciousness in my paintings in order to convey care and importance. I want to give my paintings a monumental and sensual quality that I believe can only be achieved with oil. Also, oil painting gives my work an elegance that balances the sometimes grotesque and fantastical subject matter.
If you would like to know more about me and see more of my work visit my website:
My art is a way for me to navigate difficult subjects and emotions, and as I work on each piece, I am able to meditate on, process and organize my emotions about the subject matter I am addressing.
I started really getting into art after finishing a five-year enlistment in the US Navy. I spent most of my time in the service overseas and felt completely lost when I returned to California in July 1999. I had few friends, no social life or hobbies, and an extremely difficult time finding work. I had a ton of anxiety, felt out of place, would go through episodes of depression followed by manic insomnia, and the only way I’d learned to deal with those emotions in the service was to drink excessively. I wandered into an art supply store one day, looking for something to keep my mind busy and provide an outlet for my manic energy. I started with pastels and watercolor pencils. At first, I just did my own thing, with no direction, technique, or theme. I think that’s probably the best way to get into art. It’s what children do. And they don’t compare their drawing with the other kid’s drawing, they just draw. They don’t strive for photo realism either—if you don’t see the boa constrictor eating an elephant, that’s your failing because they drew it perfectly. I was only in this golden state of mind for a short time, though.
After going through several jobs in Bakersfield, and working two years in Dutch Harbor at a seafood processing plant, I bought a tiny, run-down mobile on the property next to my parents up in Bodfish, CA. I started painting with acrylics, and I took every art class offered at the local community college. I took classes in ceramics, sculpture, drawing, and painting. I also started comparing my work to my classmates’ work. People would compliment my paintings, but I was never happy with them. I loved the classes and instructors but hated myself. I got hung up on every stray mark or brushstroke. Instead of loosening up and becoming more expressive, I was hyper-focusing on the most ridiculous things.
Blue Lotus Scratchboard with India inks. 2021
Scratchboard, oddly enough, helped get me out of this creativity-destroying state of mind. I picked up an 8×10 Ampersand Scratchboard at the art supply store one day. I grabbed a hobby knife and started digging into the clay. But as soon as I made a mistake, I realized this medium doesn’t lend itself well to corrections, and promptly threw it away. Months later, I picked up another scratchboard. There was something about it I found really satisfying, and I wanted to keep working with this medium. I use Ampersand Scratchboards, and they aren’t cheap. So, when I made an errant mark with the knife, I reimagined the scene to incorporate the mistake. I slowly began to worry less about being as realistic as possible and began working from my imagination again. I also realized that I had retained much more technical knowledge from those art classes than I thought, and I found a few artists who were always willing to impart knowledge, advice, and encouragement whenever I needed it. Thank you, Chris Owen and Chet Zar!
Left: Thinking about FridaMiddle:Prairie GhostsRight:Meeting Death in a Forest
Encouragement and acceptance from others definitely helped me to keep going. I practiced all the time. I studied how other scratchboard artists worked. Then, I would experiment with various techniques and different tools while developing my own style. I used my art to deal with difficult feelings and subjects that were triggering my depression and anxiety. Mortality, loss, kindness and cruelty, spirituality and purpose are all there, represented by skeletons, birds, flowers and cats.
Left:Enoch’s Gone Home Scratchboard, Inks Right:Empathy Scratchboard, Inks
One of the most therapeutic boards I did is Enoch’s Gone Home. I was caring for a colony of cats left behind when a neighbor died. She was a cat hoarder. It was terrible. There was one small kitten I named Enoch, who didn’t thrive. He always seemed weak. He wasn’t very assertive and often got pushed away by the others during meal times. I tried to help him, but I had very little experience with caring for community cats. One day, I noticed him looking really bad. He seemed listless and weak. I rushed him to the vet, but it was too late. I was unwilling to give up, however, so I brought him home and tried to give him water and food. Poor little guy died in my arms the same day. I felt so guilty. I took it personally. I Couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I started working on Enoch’s Gone Home.
Another favorite is this 24×36 scratchboard I did, titled, Meeting Death in a Forest. The viewer is looking up at Death, who is escorting a nest of birds into the afterlife. Everything from the perspective, light and shadow placement, and the direction of Death’s gaze is important to me. I use skeletons much of the time to represent Death, but not always. Sometimes they are not the personification of Death, but are symbolic of other human attributes or experiences. I also like to do a visual definition of a particular word as the subject of my work. Empathy and Feral are two examples. Again, everything from the feathers in Empathy to the tooth-lined tongue path leading to the cottage door in Feral is important to my definition of those words.
Wildland Urban Interface Scratchboard, inks. 2020
I take commissions, occasionally. Pet portraits are a popular request, and scratchboard is a favorite medium of pet portrait and animal artists, as it lends well to very fine details. I have seen some amazing, hyper-realistic animals on scratchboard. I think I may be the only scratchboard artist in the world who hasn’t done a lion, tiger, or zebra. But I have done human portraits—only a few though, and only of close friends and family.
Left: Battle of Nightstand Middle:The QuestRight:Seamus
I really enjoy doing studies of many different subjects. Anything that happens to catch my attention is a potential subject for a study or even a larger work. I’m constantly taking photos of anything I see around me that looks like it could be challenging, interesting, ugly or beautiful on a scratchboard.
Left: Ginger Cat Clayboard with Scratchboard inks, 2020. Right:Bamboo Clayboard with India inks, (commissioned portrait) 2019.
I do not like to be limited on what themes I address or style I use in my art. If I forced myself to focus on only a narrow theme or style, I would feel stifled and claustrophobic. I never know what I’ll work on next (unless it’s a commission). It’s always a spontaneous decision for me. I may hear a word, see something, get a feeling or be overcome with some emotion or experience that I cannot separate myself from—and that will probably be the subject of my next scratchboard.
Exhibitions: Kern Valley Museum- Kernville, Ca October 2016 Bakersfield Museum of Art- Bakersfield, Ca May 2019 Visual Arts Festival Kern Valley Museum- Kernville, Ca June 2019 Work used by Ampersand Art to advertise Fall Scratchbord sale, 2019] Arts Illiana Gallery “The Crow Show” February-April 2020
Publications and Reviews: KRV’s Hidden Gems: Kernville Arts and Crafts Festival Kern Valley Sun, September 2019 Skilled Hands Bakersfield Magazine, February 2018 [No Link Avail.] Artist Finds Focus Kern Valley Sun, June 28, 2017 First Friday, Dagny’s Coffee, November 2019
Awards and Recognition: Best in Show, The Crow Show, Arts Illiana Gallery, Terre Haute, IN 2020 1st Place, Kern County Fair, Professional Scratchboard Art- Bakersfield, Ca 2019 1st Place, Kern County Fair, Professional Scratchboard Art-Bakersfield, Ca 2018
Collections: Alex Joya, La Costa Mariscos Bakersfield, Stockdale Hwy Bakersfield Veteran’s Clinic, Bakersfield, Ca, Westwind Dr. Kern Veterinary Hospital, Lake Isabella, Ca, Lake Isabella Blvd. The Cyclesmiths, Kernville, Ca The Starlite Lounge, Kernville, Ca
And from beyond the intellect comes beautiful love trailing her skirts, with a glass of wine in her hand. Rumi From above with his selenite love descends the brief nomenclature of desire in her diamond lust kissing in purple intervals the waves that announce your steps with your coming laugh to testify about the rain and in the nyctalope depths in its germinal dance the final hour of your name.
Patriarchal Decadence
(or Brute A attacks Brute B) Do you think that money will stop being fascinating? and if one day it disappears Do you think power will lose its appeal? possessing is more addictive than loving your missiles and two more the poker of life a “quijadaso”, ‘jaw bone’ well given in the skull for Abel (although that fact marks the end of grazing and the beginning of agriculture) that happens for misreading the allegories and also wrongly see the universe added to a dark and patriarchal church I light candles for Ishtar instead and I hear the voice of the earth but… Will there be anything left to restore the feminine? End of statement, I’m going to the shelter.
Enrique de Santiago, Born in Santiago, Chile (1961). Visual artist, poet, researcher, essayist, curator and cultural manager. He studied a Bachelor of Art at the University of Chile and at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Chile). Since 1984, he has exhibited in individual and group exhibitions, counting to his credit around more than 100 exhibitions. He has edited five books: Fragile Transits Under the Spirals in 2012, with La Polla Literaria; Elegía a las Magas and the book essay: El Regreso de las Magas, both with Editorial Varonas. In 2018 he edited La Cúspide Uránica with editorial Xaleshem and Dharma Comunicaciones, and Travel Bitácora with Editorial Opalina Cartonera. He has participated in various poetry anthologies, both in Chile and abroad. He has collaborated in the newspaper La Nación with articles on new media art, and in magazines such as Derrame, Escaner Cultural and Labios Menores in Chile, Brumes Blondes in Holland, Adamar from Spain, Punto Seguido from Colombia, Sonámbula from Mexico, Agulha de Brazil, Incomunidade de Portugal, Styxus de Rep. Czech, Canibaal de Valencia, Spain, Materika de Costa Rica and other printed and digital publications.
An automatic drawing is the starting point for an image. A powerful sense of promised adventure arises and the process of freely transferring the drawing onto the canvas will trigger an opening of doorways to another world. Nothing can be forced and it’s similar to a two-way conversation with the developing image before me.
I have to listen and the process is always full of surprises. Constantly having a feeling of ‘otherness’, alongside a foreign/unknown part of me, comes forth as a flow of departing points.
Left Talking Heads. Right Psychic Machine
Fantastic Duet Acrylic on Canvas 90cm x 60cm
Surrealism was just part of a larger personal picture for me, with no aspirations of calling myself a surrealist …or anything else. But it strangely seemed to follow me.
Left Dark Carnival. Right Optical Lab
Night Music Acrylic on Canvas 65cm x 81cm
Outsider art has a compulsive need to externalize an inner world with no ego and a wonderful innocence.
Drawings From Patrick Hourihan Dibujo Automático
London -based Surrealist, Patrick Hourihan. Paintings, Automatic Drawings, and Boxed Assemblages. photo David Caldwell
Full interview with Antonio Rámirez / Translation by Gala Milla
The faceless figures in Rene Fernando Ortega Villarroel’s work open a doorway to our silhouette.
Las figuras sin rostro en la obra de René Fernando Ortega Villarroel abren una puerta a nuestra silueta.
A labyrinth that challenges realities between an all-knowing self and a unicursal passage of selves.
Un laberinto que desafía realidades entre un yo que todo lo sabe y un pasaje unicursal de yos.
The viewer will see waves of motion paused long enough to discover psychic architecture and lapidary engines.
El espectador verá ondas de movimiento pausadas el tiempo suficiente para descubrir la arquitectura psíquica y los motores lapidarios.
Rene Fernando Ortega Villarroel’s art delivers a psychic experience to our world. The deities are shapes and eternal archetypes
El arte de René Fernando Ortega Villarroel entrega una experiencia psíquica a nuestro mundo. Las deidades son formas y arquetipos eternos.
The vision is an art beyond the vanishing points camouflaged and hunted by shamanic, artistic, and theurgic observance.
La visión es un arte más allá de los puntos de fuga camuflados y cazados por la observancia chamánica, artística y teúrgica
Rene Fernando Ortega Villarroel is a visual artist from Chile who practices the ancient tradition of X-ray vision in his painting.
René Fernando Ortega Villarroel es un artista visual de Chile que practica la antigua tradición de la visión de rayos X en su pintura.
Rene has exhibited work in Chile and Argentina. He is involved in many cultural art programs that have related to hospitals, children and teaching art professionally.
René ha expuesto obra en Chile y Argentina. Está involucrado en muchos programas de arte cultural relacionados con hospitales, niños y la enseñanza del arte profesionalmente.
“My concern is the human figure as a feeling of primitive and irrational states, whose main point is the heads, universal thought of the creation of man and center of the universe. All this led to a mutation of the plastic and pictorial language”. Rene Ortega Villarroel
“Mi preocupación es la figura humana como sentimiento de estados primitivos e irracionales, cuyo punto principal son las cabezas, pensamiento universal de la creación del hombre y centro del universo. Todo esto llevado a un mutamiento del lenguaje plástico y pictórico”. Rene Ortega Villarroel
Everyone is invited and welcome to celebrate Rene Fernando Ortega Villarroel’s exposition Mental Labyrinths at the Til Til Cultural Center Art gallery on June 18, 2022
Todos están invitados y bienvenidos a celebrar la exposición Laberintos mentales de René Fernando Ortega Villarroel en la galería de arte del Centro Cultural Til Til el 18 de junio de 2022.
05/14/21 cosmic fires burn behind the rich, black fabric of the night which parts to let the magic pass as particles of filtered light the door lies open, the gate lies closed life travels, small and swift through tiny tears a missing stitch and life. the flow itself the tear itself the seam a sight of seeming death that folds, unfolds itself in weeds of grief and swaddles itself and for the first time sees that there the door lies open to those laid out or she on knees black wings opened out speak out in seven rings the universe talks and, so, we sing
07/09/21 shifting stars and shifting rays of light pierce, project through fractal lens into the fractured night the universe mind filters through this facet and another then the other and the next it’s all-color light refracted into rainbow shimmer variations, life the shadow dark descent of being is iridescent sacred, sweet the night is full of teeming things and thoughts of universe that sings
09/03/21 black wings flap against the dawn lingering sweetly in the dark prolonging, savoring the last few tendrils of night but the dark, black velvet sky grows thin and soon the silken cloth of twilight transparent and delicate ripples, dissolves in a moment is gone and morning begins a teardrop bright and golden falls to the bottom of the deep blue bowl that holds it, the sky and rolls back down the otherside and so the sun descends again, again again once, we saw it rise but that was long ago before we learned its name and learned to make the choice ever to fall or ever to rise or yet-to-be asleep abide
EGREGORE An exhibition by the Atlanta Surrealist Group Steven Cline, Hazel Cline, Aaron Dylan Kearns, Juli Maria Kearns, Megan Leach, Steve Morrison. October 21-31 2021 The Bakery – Atlanta, Georgia
ELEPHANT WORLD
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
Grey smoke, static-waiting in this lonely god-form, the elephant world. Atmosphere of iron, melting into sea. The sea must move. Must never stop. Yet, it never forgets. From the cavernous, from the well, a swallow jumps. Its cry the first sound, its wings flap the first wind into being and make the movers move. Time, wrapped in a desert blanket, becomes muffled. A lunar heli-clipse spirals inside outside, holding death in her paws, crush what skull to wholeness? A mouse, a mouse of silver coat, has singed the lungs of the elephants who dance in circles under their lost mother, the moon. Stars expand, devouring the black, betraying the void. And as the myriad forms octopi the fountains of misery, love and thermometers break free. Is it cold or burning in the heart of the world; Is it strange, or stranger?
01/03/2020 the darkening skies must shudder and crack the darkening limits of love must break and the lightning must flow through the veins of the glow the violet glow of history unchained and memory unknown there is a quiet place in unrequited grief we must keep our face streaked with grief and never forget again that we love the lightning of hillsides and the lightening of hearts must not stop the lightning that breaks our barriers apart
Ornithomancy: divination by observation of the flight of birds
ALLCLOCKWORK
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
The Universe, her own lost lover, may be seen as machine, as a spiraling victorian machine of goldgear, allclockwork like a song, who descends again this dream. Angelic beings formulated only as a song of pure smell drift inward, licking like a perfumed song. A scented song that melts into black glass, darker than vacuum and more crystalline than volcanic orangutans. The seabird honks slowly, irreversibly, a world into myth. The spiderweb lacework left behind by all this resembles only slightly the forlorn face of Desire and her aging pack-animal, the horned, helical diviser of all manners of play. Patterns of a great mathematical sigh leap forward, and reveal themselves to have been all along a simple jest to amuse the one remembered in Desire’s lair. Speak! Reverse! This, the pelican calls to me, to be unafraid. This last day is sweet. A multitude, an ancient epoch, indwelling therein may, inside those glittering gears, break bread with shadows. But ever, ever, while the lonely lives we lead sits weeping by her mirror, can the Victrola spit out its slugs of light. In the sky above, what! cries the clouds, what is this fracture, this suture called time? Or elsewhere called form? Around us, a tower sheds its skin. Inside us, a tower devours and delights. And this hour is born as if it were the first hour, and the last hour, penetrating deep the ear of the Other. Again and again, but this time, the gears are well worn. This time…our ghosts dance.
RAINBOW DIVING
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
A rainbow earthbound, dividing itself, disassembling. Red, caught in prairie dog’s embrace, builds his mudhouse around the hourglass cavern entrance. Blue, thoughtform, endodermic emissaries as its always, reshapes rain into purring playful kittens. Red, again, many times, but this time, most sweetly does it redden. Yellow kicks world’s undercarriage in its shins, bumbling slowly, stupidly; of all the violent yellows of the imagination, honey alone is tenderest, a spongecake, a saucy milksop. Ah, but purple! A color now, and then another. One color and many, Solitary and mixed. But all of these are just wet laundry in cardboard, skybleeders without care. Try instead the complexity of the allcolor udder that fills bellybirth calendars with Orange with Orange’s sad and wayward beams. Indeed, full orchards in bloom. Undercurrents undersea, liquidic petunias, Green breaks all this in her witherworn gaze, drowning into pulpworm magnificents. Learn well, then, the mazes of the deeps, or fall eternally, inexorably into farting arabesques! Or else, the obsidian horizons and wellsprings by which the silent tuber sleeps.
A Virtual Post Card to the Clines from Mitchell Pluto
SPIDERWAVES
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
Sun on my face; worm in my palm. Where is the tree I saw before I was born if not in your heart? A dancer pounds the sand into myriad dynasties of memory. Eruption of geometric solids from a hardening ground. Devastated again and again into life. Without an eclipse of the moon; Without the face I missed and without the soonness of the end. Satisfaction gave way to a pomegranate; and then the dancers in the sky, in the night, in the sand fuse via epilepsy. Shadows silver, and I find I have something to lose. Something, as in hat or muskrat, but in other words there are many things of which we are made of. Mountainous sheets of white sand, signing high notes inside, outside. What is a mountain if not the universe? All I can think of is…whale. All I can think of is whale, which is everything. Everything, blowing sheet metal kisses across aquatic dreamtime streams. Kiss, then the sands, kiss then wind. The river makes love as you fly from the waterfall to the ocean. Spiderwaves crashing in your ears, and wouldn’t you know it? A secret succumb to the drifts.
CATERWAULING
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
Impish sprouts, come now, rejoin the nature choir. Spout from belly, cast skin aside, rejoin the broken ends of hairway screaming. Become erect in thy tendrils, in thy vines, in thy flowering eyelids, eyelips. Scales, weatherworn, may become grey or spotted, may become a disease repeated. Repetitive formlessness may become eyeless. Liked a castaway grail, like a traveler without species or a lichen dripping, frothing from the tips of broken fingers. Inside Castle, the deepness sleeps. The deepness repeats, reaching longingly out through the ribcagebars that hold its will in check. Across swampmoat, a game of chess is played, and yes, a checkmate too. A matter of alligator flesh, weighs your worth on its scales. Firebreather, O firething, O fireeater, bring forth the charred pieces of moleblind contempt, thy master. And lay him here, unbroken on that breakening altar, his feetflesh pollinated by cold wind. But the wind will have none of it. Virgin the wind is and will remain, no matter how many times she is raped. Caterwauling is a way for millipedes to divide and seek out that onebrightmissingthing. O everfree! O everleaving! A soul’s void casts its own shadow, too, my friend. O overbearing openness! Such openness is evisceration. Is evisceration, or crushed and squirming eggplant. A call: come now, worm, come now wind, defend your keep! Atom and Electron, enemies, conspirators, corpuscular in their insane infancy. We shall become nematodes on this day, or we shall expire. Thus is the will of the organ defended. Thus is the desire of the flesh raised again.
When I bite down, my teeth spread fire. I bite down on tree, I bite down hard…a California, newly blackened. When I bite down on swimming pool? When I bite down on sea? I see the ships come and go in the night. From where do they come and wither do they go again? Where but the watery depths that hold the stars with a cargo such as that they leave at every doorstep and every grave. A ghost hand floating, a hand laid down, in a casket amongst friends. A weaponized hairplane, and a truth? Pearly truth? Pearly, yes, of the falsest kind, unlike the inky liquid left by the octopus my sister stepped on that summer when we were five or six. The luster of a pearl reflects the hungry gaze of the wanderer. But the unreflective black of closed eyes or submersion under the hungry waves shows the empty colors and flashes that call upward from eternity’s open veins…
LADYBUG LEVIATHAN
Collaborative writing: Hazel & Steven Cline
City of Cyber, inside belly of Panda. Inside panda-belly, squirming datanet suckers towards the base of your brain. Down flows the river of nerves, down winding, writhing around one another and the spine of this world. This planet called Ladybug Leviathan, this universe called Old Misery Guts. Once again this universe tells the story of the time when the slimesnake jacked in with his god cord, shivering electrical. And jacked off into the abyssal plains of the sordid, sacred animal brain of the metrosynaptic gecko. Everything teal here, everything teal or sometimes pink. And blood always purple, and blood rerouted through networks of laughter that rumble through those beautiful bowels that wailed and woke the world before worlds. Reprogram this panda, O history-keeper, O kelp-satisfied lizard of night’s mist. Open at last the lid behind the lid. Exsanguinate, expectorate, mark the spot where the psionic piston rotates. What, then, if that rotation should cease? What, then, if all the dark little spots behind your eyes should suddenly come to life?
I started drawing tarot cards as a way to deepen my relationship with and understanding of the characters and archetypes that people them. I went along with the fool on their journey, and together we struggled, died, were reborn, learned about life and ourselves, and started all over again.
Mitchell Pluto 