yesterday’s bright studio light,
catching color out of the corner of my eye.
preparing for DFZ Gartside discussion
reading poetry for the Slade Colour & Poetry symposium
mapping out a poetry manuscript with Poetry Forge
colour or color
no matter how you spell it
connects the dots
Mother Ann Lee
29 February 1736 — 8 September 1784
Cosmic feminist karma
Inspired when first in,
When women invited in.
A broadsheet to marketh the course, to report.
Lace repurposed, given new life, liberties,
infused with psychedelic indigo.
A spectrum instructed with solemnity
Occasionally, light flickers.
Mother Ann Lee embodied cosmic feminist karma
bringing a new religion into the worldf
ounded on principles so radical that they endured persecutions
One could say her broadsheet was verbal;
she being illiterate to written words
yet literate in all realms cosmic
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The written Testimonies of her contemporary believers
and works of the later visionists-scribes themselves of hearts and leaves
and maps and flowers and trees--
scripted scrolls brought down from spirits’ energies spoke to her cosmic energy.
Stone Prison
How can I but love my dear faithful children
Who’re willing to bear and suffer with me
When I was on earth and in a cold prison, I cry’d
To my God to remember me
I prayed to God to protect my dear children,
To strengthen the weak and comfort the strong
For I was distressed and in a stone prison,
And none but my God to protect me from harm.
—excerpt from ‘meetinghouse’ -- spoken word by Brece Honeycutt & Shaker song/Stone Prison sung by Miriam Cantor Stone. performed at Shaker Heritage Society for Moonbow #6, July 29 2023.
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2 years ago today, Copy Press launched
‘A Bird to overhear-‘ for their Becoming Fireflies series!
“Are we listening? Are you listening?
When did I start listening?
When’d di you first hear them? Do you recall which one?
Was it the dawn chorus? Or the wail, cry, caw at last light?
When did it dawn on you? Are you listening?
Can you name them? How many can you name?
According to the New York Times only 1 in 8 can
Name more than 20 species. Can you name their songs?Can you hear them? Can you see their flight patterns?
The landscape architect Gertrude Jekyll, once blind,
could name them by the sound of their wings in flight.”
-text excerpt from 'Listening" chapter | watch ‘A Bird to overhear-‘
I am forever grateful to Copy Press for their faith in my work. Thanks a million, Vit Hopley, Yve Lomax, Jono Lomax and Opel Morgen for this collaboration and all you did to make it happen.
'A Bird to overhear-' photography, filming/Brece Honeycutt; script, narrator/Brece Honeycutt; script editor/Vit Hopley; producer/Yve Lomax; video-editing, post production/Jono Lomax; graphics/Opal Morgen; thumbnail image/Brece Honeycutt
Rainbows
In dye swatches
In color torn from pages
On wooden spools of thread
Research materials for
Poetry manuscript class-
A Body of Work-
with Poetry Forge
White
Yellow
Orange
Scarlet
Green
Blue
Crimson
Violet
Arranging found color today and thinking of the newly published, ‘Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) Abstract Visions of Colour’ invaluable scholarship by Dr. Alexandra Loske.
Mary Gartside’s eight colors illustrated “Colour Circle, from the Borrow Copy of Mary Gartside, An Essay on Light and Shade 1805, engraving with hand-colouring.”
Not only did Gartside write about colour theory, but she brought in abstraction with her ‘colour blots.’ The ‘white blot’ captures the tints of our grey skies as of late.
2 Images from Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) Abstract Visions of Colour published by Thomas Heneage Art Books.
Find more information on Alexandra Loske and her colour research, here. Mary Gartside (c.1755-1819) Abstract Visions of Colour published by Thomas Heneage Art Books
morning collage/watercolor
responding to the objects on my table
Geoff Young chap book
paste paper folder
tangled threads
or the grey outside
greyed:
palest grey to white
violet grey
pink cosmos grey
violets dropped in milk grey
a drop of cobalt blue grey
orangesicle ice cream grey
sunpoked through yellow grey
old yellowed newspaper grey
grey green sky portends rain
“The human eye can perceive over a million different varieties of color, but the human brain has better things to do than name them all.”
“Newton segmented the spectrum into just seven named colors:
the classic ROY G BIV divisions.”
“While this might have seemed arbitrary, much later research by anthropologists concluded that most cultures at least have names for
black, white, red, green, yellow and blue:
six basic color terms typically in that order, as if there were an innate hierarchy.”
[ from Neil Parkinson, “The History of Color: A Universe of Chromatic Phenomena”]
fabric pieces include chair and rug tape & old cloth
sleeping mats & ottomans made from ‘plarn’ aka recycled plastic shopping bags
images from the exhibition, The Alchemy of Re.Use curated by Hettler.Tullmann for the Shaker Museum and on view at the Knitting Mill in Kinderhook NY
Thanks to Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon for the panel discussion about reuse and the necessity to make with one’s hands and use what we already have in hand.
series of ‘butterflies & moths’ collaged works over the past 6 months
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and a Mary Oliver poem . . One or Two Things Don’t bother me. I’ve just been born.
The butterfly’s loping flight carries it through the country of the leaves delicately, and well enough to get it where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping here and there to fuzzle the damp throats of flowers and the black mud; up and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes
for long delicious moments it is perfectly lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk of some ordinary flower.
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening
to his dog voice, crow voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever,
which has nevertheless always been, like a sharp iron hoof, at the center of my mind.
One or two things are all you need to travel over the blue pond, over the deep roughage of the trees and through the stiff flowers of lightning—some deep memory of pleasure, some cutting knowledge of pain.