Put a Simile on your Aphasia

Last night we had a slide show presentation by several visual artists. There was a wonderful bronzecaster called Camie Geary-Martin. I can appreciate some of what she goes through as I took a bronzecasting class in college. Another guy, Don Simon, has these colored pencil drawings that depict animals in juxtaposition with civilization. He has one called "Cows on Garbage" which shows Holsteins standing atop piles of garbage like at a dump. Another one called "River" has crocodiles amongst piles of tires. The texture of the tires and the crocodiles is remarkably similar. His work is amazing. The detail is precise. One woman likes old barns and factories and that's all she paints. Her slide show was, "And this is another barn in Connecticut, another barn in Connecticut, another barn in Connecticut..." A woman named Linda Howe does something called touchdrawing, which I can't explain, but the outcome is very sweeping and colorful. It was an interesting night. The last fellow had some very muddy paintings filled with abstract shapes that he explained in philosophical terms. The most I could decipher was "motif" and "arch." Someone in the audience pointed out that his shapes looked like the shadow created by an arch, not the arch itself. His answer was so convoluted I couldn't understand it, except he said "arch" is the basis for the word "architecture."

Tonight there was a talk on meditation by one of the founders, Jon Gregg. We all sat in the little meditation room, with candles lit, and he talked about the mind and its idiosyncrasies. It was about noticing stuff rather than trying to change everything. And not being so focussed on a particular goal when you work, to the exclusion of all the possibilities for creativity in other directions. Then there was a reading by the mentor poet Harryette Mullen. She is wonderfully inventive with words. I truly enjoyed her reading. She had one poem called "A Simile on your Aphasia."