To begin at the beginning

" (...)

FIRST VOICE
Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the
streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the

SECOND VOICE
titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and
bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva
and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks
and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine
and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.

FIRST VOICE
The owls are hunting. Look, over Bethesda gravestones one
hoots and swoops and catches a mouse by Hannah Rees, Beloved
Wife. And in Coronation Street, which you alone can see it
is so dark under the chapel in the skies, the Reverend Eli
Jenkins, poet, preacher, turns in his deep towards-dawn
sleep and dreams of

REV. ELI JENKINS

Eisteddfodau.

         (...)

"

 Dylan Thomas - Under Milk Wood 

Chinese Ink, water colour pencil, paper

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Hoot and Swoop

"The whirr of flapping leather bands and hum of dynamos from the powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I. Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too with the blow. Shatter me you who can. Bawd and butcher, were the words. I say! Not yet awhile. A look around."

James Joyce - Ulysses

water colour pencil on paper

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Wings

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.” 

-- Martha Graham --

Water colour pencils and chinese ink

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Caverns and Waves

"They tell us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but I don’t believe that," he said. Then, a moment later, he added: "Oh, the fear is there, all right. It comes to us in many different forms, at different times, and overwhelms us. But the most frightening thing we can do at such times is to turn our backs on it, to close our eyes. For then we take the most precious thing inside us and surrender it to something else. In my case, that something was the wave."  

                                                                              Blind Willow Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami

   Acrylic on canvas

                          

                                                          

                                                                          

            "One can coincide with oneself only by agreeing never to rejoin oneself" 

Simone De Beauvoir

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The Wasteland

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidiin ampulla pendere,  

et cum illi pueri dicerent:Σιβυλλα τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω.
(...)

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

         (...)"

   - T.S Eliot -The Wasteland -

Pencil on Paper

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  For the full poem read by Eliot himself:

                                            

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"...at noon at the edge of the field"

" 'Down from our heads veils fell,' said Rhoda, ' We clasped the flowers with their green leaves rustling in garlands.'
' We changed, we became unrecognisable,' said Louis. 'Exposed to all these different lights, what we had in us (for we are all so different) came intermittently. in violent patches, spaced by blank voids, to the surface as if some acid had dropped unequally on the plate'"

The Waves - Virginia Woolf  

Pencil on paper

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"It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were…..The sounds of the guitar"

I. Seventy Years Later - Wallace Stevens

                   

Check out Erased Tapes Label, this is their wonderful new contribution. 

On paper it leaves

"Recalling a piercing voice in old dreams
And ghostly images of black trains
Now seeing every page is turned away
I wanted to own your portrait
Wanted to have it

You and your scribbled paper makes me shiver so"

Little Dragon - Scribbled paper

Pencil on paper. Image inspired by Shaun Tan's "Eric"

                                        



                                           

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More to come

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