The Artist

The artist is leaning back, the paintbrush poised delicately between the fingers of an upraised hand. The brush is long and slender, a light wooden wand with blond bristles. Her fingernails are long and surprisingly clean, white tipped. Her smile radiates not only from her parted lips that reveal white teeth and the pink inside of her mouth, but also, more prominently, that smile shines in her glittering black eyes. She wears an apron decorated with pink roses over a black tank top. The table is covered with clean newspapers. There is not a stray splash of paint to be seen. The canvass standing on the table top over the support of a small easel is already halfway covered with paint. The emerging scene is a larger replication of a scene depicted on a small note pad that rests on the table top just below the canvass. Both are representations of little wooden dolls like the one that can barely be seen peeping around the edge of the canvas. Only its round pink cheek and wide almond shaped eye are visible along with the wave of visible hair that frames her face and the white cap that tops it. The eyes of the little doll and of the drawn doll and painted doll are all big eyes, dark in the center like the painter’s shiny black eyes. They are all replicas of the original, with her pink cheek and wave of dark hair crowning her head. The careful reproductions are all copies, a copy of a copy of a copy of a woman. A woman with high arched brows and pink lips and flowers on her clothes. A woman who makes things with her hands and knows the secret of making things and smiles with the knowledge of it. A goddess that has unraveled the secret of creation and does it so carefully, so painstakingly, that not a single line goes stray, that not one petite droplet of color falls wasted on the workspace or smeared on a hand or cheek. Even the brush is clean, as if the painting is being produced with nothing more than a carefully concentrated attention that burns the image upon the canvass at the painter’s will. Another pair of clean brushes can be seen poking out of a can, their bristles pointing upward just above the head of the small wooden doll that remains partially concealed by the canvass. Everything is clean. Every line is in place. And the artist beams with the joy of creation.

Thirsty Sea Demon

Beyond the sliding glass doors, a rickety dock extends into the water like a wooden tongue thrust from the mouth of the little modular home to probe the briny blue. The rectangular frame of the house and its petite stature make it seem to be hardly more than a box of animal crackers perched precariously at the lip of a swimming pool made to churn by riotous children. Its paneling is light tan, the trim around the sliding glass door is white. The flat roof supplies a scant awning from which a few potted ferns and a spider plant dangle.
There is something of a small porch here, barely wide enough to accommodate a lawn chair composed of yellow and blue plaid vinyl lattice. Four wooden steps drop down from the porch and connect the house to the dock. The dock itself is dark with moisture, its many thick round barnacle covered legs reach down into the hidden green depths. Each plank is wide and riddled with Swiss cheese holes flanked by rusted iron bolt heads. The wood is interrupted by weathered lengths of thick double braided rope interlacing the planks. Along one side, an ancient mariner’s net hangs rotting like the veil of some gargantuan maritime witch. The wind whips wildly about, agitating the surf and setting a wind chime hung near the spider plant into an ecstatic frenzy of jangling.
The waves rock the old dock violently. Above their dark blue orgiastic rampage, high cloud cover darkens and creeps from horizon to shore at a snails pace, driving them increasingly into greater excitement. They grab at the little dock and rock it like the eager and ungovernable hands of a giant.
Out at the end of its length, a woman is balanced with her long legs poised in a wide sprawl. It is the caricatured stance of a cowboy in a standoff. The muscles of her calves, legs, and thighs work to keep her braced atop the dock. The white shorts she wears encapsulate and just barley conceal her tensed buttocks. Her canary colored open necked sweatshirt hangs from one shoulder, revealing the lines of the white racer tank top worn underneath.
In one hand, she holds a dark green corked bottle, raised outward as she shouts commandingly into the wind and at the wall of waves. With the free hand she gestures to six or seven terra cotta pots arranged in a semi circle around her at the docks end. Some of the pots are empty, while others contain only black soil and the withered remains of some long dead plant.
A few are home to sickly pale twists of Jade, made unhappy by their exposure to salty sea spray. They are of various shapes and sizes. Some are in perfect condition. Others are stained and chipped and bear painful long cracks in their sides. Her long blond hair ripples on the wily wind currents, hovering around her head like a flame atop a candle’s wick.
Before her, the waves are suspended, looming over her comparably delicate body and the rickety deck. They have almost assumed the shape of a body, trembling with agitation. With aqueous creature mouths they seem to grin maniacally, then grimace, pointed ears of water flattened back like the ears of an angry cat, while the rest of the surrounding sea continues to froth and churn violently. It wriggles in animated swirls of surf, cerulean laced with white foam, directed upward and held together by supernatural force. In this awkward state of suspended animation, it listens intently to the woman’s shouting, and thus restrained, it watches with anticipation, the whole of its attention captivated by the green bottle of wine and the definitive gesturing.

Ancient Dance

Everything is black except the dancing bodies illuminated by firelight.

I sense that we are on the edge of a tall cliff with nothingness spilling into the distance. The women who were once covered in veils and cloth have shed their layers, given up their modesty and fear of earthly retribution by decency, laws and men.

There are female drummers along the edge of the cliff, the shadows of flames move across their amber skin.

One clearly visible drummer is wearing tattered clothes, sexy in their dirtiness and caveman aesthetic.

All of the women are barefoot, dancing on the floor of an ancient, sacred cliff. Long, wavy hair sways wildly in circles as they move. Their movements look like guttural, body responses to the calls and instructions of the rhythms. The movements are heavy and pound upon and into the earth with extreme intention.