I think we all could stand to use more SAT words.

The blogosphere is incredible. I was lucky enough to have my artwork found by someone across the world in Noosa, Australia, who used my painting, "Your Voice Was Smooth; Like Water Running Over Rocks" to illustrate her word of the week, "Mellifluous.  Thanks, Felicity, for sharing my artwork on your lovely blog and also for expanding my vocabulary.

"Mellifluous

[adj.]  flowing, like honey.

Sweet or smooth, generally used to describe a person's voice, tone or writing style.

From the latin mellifluus ["flowing like honey"], from mel [honey] + fluo [flow].

Today's word is one of my favourite, not only for the musicality as I say it out loud, but also because I love what it describes.  The artwork I've chosen to illustrate this word is by Gina Marie Dunn and is titled 'Your Voice was Smooth; Like Water Running Over Rocks' which evokes dulcet and mellifluous tones in my mind."

This painting is 24" x 36" x 1.5". This is one of my favorite sizes to work with. It is available for purchase, contact me for details. 

The Glass Coin

I'm stoked that my painting, "Your Voice Was Smooth; Like Water Running Over Rocks" was chosen as the October cover art for Ontario-based Literary Zine, The Glass Coin.  The Glass Coin is a split-themed open zine that explores both sides of an idea...examples are "Heroes and Villains", "Eureka! and Oops!", and October's theme was "Oil and Watercolor".  

"Your Voice Was Smooth; Like Water Running Over Rocks"

24" x 36" x 1.5"

Oil and Mixed on Canvas

The irony lies in the fact that I used both of these seemingly unfriendly media in the painting that was chosen, and then some. I often work in collage, ink, acrylics, oils and watercolor in the same piece.  Maybe that makes me indecisive and a bit schizophrenic, or the other part of me believes that's my way of just trying to make everything get along in a sort of peaceful harmony that can be achieved only when the composition feels finished.


By the way, this piece is on display at The Blues Jean Bar in Snider Plaza and available for purchase. Message me for more details.

A Poem For Wednesday: Postscript

Poetry is like breathing. It happens all the time. Poetry is life. Poetry celebrates life. It is life as seen through the prism of another's thoughts, of their process of thinking. Poetry doesn't give answers. It asks questions but the answers are elusive. But in the poetry, in these questions, these perspectives, we find ways of coping, ways of venting, ways of release from all the vicissitudes that life presents us with.

Your Voice Was Smooth; Like Water Running Over Rocks

24" x 36" x 1.5"

Oil and Mixed on Canvas

This painting is currently on display at The Blues Jean Bar in Snider Plaza

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
so that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffeings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.


In college I took a course in Irish Literature. It was a course for Lit Majors but I took it anyway. One day my professor said "The finest poet writing in the English language today is Seamus Heaney."  That was the first I heard his name, over 30 years ago. With Heaney, I found a poet who engaged me in a constant conversation. Each poem was a kind of search, an examination of life and at the same time witness to life.

A Poem for Wednesday: Dutiful

"Transition"

30" x 40"

Oil and Mixed Media on Canvas

Fine Art Giclee Prints available on my Etsy site.

DUTIFUL


How did I get so dutiful? Was I always that way?
Going around as a child with a small broom and dustpan,
sweeping up dirt I didn't make,
or out into the yard with a stunted rake,
weeding the gardens of others
– the dirt blew back, the weeds flourished, despite my efforts –
and all the while with a frown of disapproval
for other people's fecklessness, and my own slavery.
I didn't perform these duties willingly.
I wanted to be on the river, or dancing,
but something had me by the back of the neck.
That's me too, years later, a purple-eyed wreck,
because whatever had to be finished wasn't, and I stayed late,
grumpy as a snake, on too much coffee,
and further on still, those groups composed of mutterings
and scoldings, and the set-piece exhortation:
Somebody ought to do something!
That was my hand shooting up.

But I've resigned. I've ditched the grip of my echo.
I've decided to wear sunglasses, and a necklace
adorned with the gold word no,
and eat flowers I didn't grow.
Still, why do I feel so responsible
for the wailing from shattered houses,
for birth defects and unjust wars,
and the soft, unbearable sadness
filtering down from distant stars?

by Margaret Atwood