Aureantes' Lair

Yeah, yeah, I know that the deep vibrant blue against the deep darkblood red is eye-twangingly intense. You know what, though? --I've got my reasons. If you remember any of them, drop me a line. :-|

At the moment, I'm on a bender of re-tweaking everything that I have the ability to tweak, including my LJ details, my Yahell frontpages, and even my stodgy old MS Windows desktop style formats, getting as much damn distinctiveness as I can out of them without being able to design them totally from scratch.

Oh, and the office/studio redecorating down at the music school went quite well -- so well that I'm (supposedly) even going to get paid for it (!!!!). So, that's 19 hours of sheer practical creativity in the service of professional image. Aaaaaand...I am going to be attempting an art class for musicians to help them explore their stylistic gestalts and find their niche for how to present and market themselves uniquely. This is a totally new thing, and I am going to do it. Just like teaching formal figure drawing to kids in the primary grades 'cause they shouldn't have to wait until highschool and college to get the foundations of it.

It is quite useful to be able to just have an idea and act on it, without taking seriously the general rules that say one can't or one shouldn't be able to do that sort of thing. Grain of mustardseed and all that...>:)

Last Art League class till September today...I know, I haven't kept up on my erstwhile weekly bulletins regarding that. This quarter was frustrating because of late registrations and erratic attendance, as well as having a student art exhibit due up by the end of the month without being able to finish the course first. I don't refuse people on account of signing up late, but I do wish they'd be consistent once they started. I hope I haven't forgotten to say too much on account of it being Summer Quarter and only a 6-week term......I hate 6-week terms -- you never really feel like you get anywhere, even if you try to take the pressure off of getting somewhere so that it's not a constant urgency. I want the kids to have a good time and not get dried out with too much criticism, but at the same time I want to be able to push them hard enough to really see some forward movement. I know there has been some, maybe even a lot, but at the same time there's so much of 'in one ear and out the other' and not really actively grasping the image and making the most of it. Next term I must be more flagrantly physical and whip out the Play-Doh without ado.

And show off more. :-| I'm too damn modest, you know that? And in so much of a hurry to get the kids active that I often forget to show them 'where I am' as a precursor to helping them get further along in their development.

Enh, must stop before I start channelling......:-|

(No, not like that....not in front of the children....gah...no...nooo.....AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!)


There, now I feel better.... >:)

_

Some years ago, I drew a picture in charcoal pencil on white canvas board, a naked and grieving figure with long light disheveled hair and black demon-style wings shielding its body, hands hiding its face, in something like the poses of Masaccio's Adam and Eve being driven out of Eden, for it too was being driven out, leaving in bitterness.

It hung on my bedroom wall for a long while after, as one of my favourite and most symbolic pieces -- like that crouching male figure caught startled, its body inked and wounded, white bull's-horns on its head, its features blindly masked with gold, gold overlay'd with bright fresh-blood red, barbaric and strange -- or the girl in green kirtle and hooded cloak, running up a hill into the shelter of the forest, in a hazy green overcast afternoon before the rain. Or the page of assembled b/w figure-vignettes, the same persona in different poses and states of abandon, solitude, falling, flying, rising out of a sunken grave...doubled even, split light-and-dark or twinned in sympathy, reaching out across a space of floor and tense-charged air.

All of these. But this one with my outcast angel-demon, it fell from the wall one day, when I was happy or had every right to be. Inanimate things try to tell us -- like when I was wearing my Thor's Wheel pendant and it fell off my neck, leaving just the stag's-head pentacle I'd been keeping undercover since then. The Thor's Wheel made a convenient cross, to those who would assume it -- and I had no quarrel with the concepts, either of them -- but sometimes there comes a time when one must let the assumption, no matter how harmless, fall, and claim the definite difference instead.

The picture is standing up in another corner, its action remembered now (such a telling anecdote) because I have remembered it. And yet it will not be a completed act till that outcast angel is answered and redressed (no, not like that.../:)), restored to its rightful glory.

Which requires another drawing, or painting, or two or three...fallen things must rise, must rise, must rise. Nevermind that tracery of anguished paint on the mirror there.