shE makes me want again to take up my brushes...

Miss Audrey Kawasaki paints on wood... an amazing artist is she.

It's been more than twelve years since I picked up a brush. I went to work one day at a television station, picked up Photoshop, and my brushes have languished like Poe's House of Usher ever since. I picked up a pen in earnest about the same time and began to write poetry... few stories, because they require the patience of a saint and the determined insanity of a free climber. I have patience in spades but not the gritty determination. The desire is there. It hasn't left. Nor will it. My gift's muscles will wither and atrophy, but exercise will bring them back to life. Yet in order to pick those brushes up again, I've got to have something to say. I'm not even sketching anymore, so whatever voice I have it has been as celibate as I have, lo, these many years.

But miss Kawasaki makes me want again to take up my brushes, and in both wide and fine swathes give my dreams a measure of corporeal presence they've not enjoyed in a long while. Few artists inspire me, which is why I even bother mentioning miss Kawasaki...

My Brush, Dreams' Clarion

Lips a' blush
at the tip of a brush
rose madder and silky pearl
on wooden dreams unfurl
our lips brush
while intimacies blush
hands steady
colors wide, heady and thin
in
swathes, corporeally
stand and demand
~ yearning attention
dreams' intention all along

ELAshley
033110.034926.6

Sorry, didn't mean to wax lyrical. It happens.

I look at miss Kawasaki's work and I am amazed-- I wish for talent like hers --but I must remember that she lives with her talent every moment of her life. As do I. What I see as mundane (seeing it every moment of my life) others look and say "I am amazed!". As am I, at times, when I step back and look at what I've created. Did I really do that? I ask. What force directed my hand?. The easy answer is God.But truthfully, He gave me and miss Kawasaki extraordinary gifts, but we can choose to use them or bury them someplace dark where languishment and atrophy smother dreams. Sometimes our hands are directed. Sometimes not. Having a gift is no guarantee that all we do will stand apart. Standing apart is a struggle, ask people like Dennis B. He succeeds, but success is by no means assured. We must work for it.

It's time to go out into the back yard tonight and in the dark dig up my brushes and wanton inspirations and nurse them back to health.