Beautiful Morning…

It’s a gorgeous Sunday morning and I’ve been having a lovely weekend. The weather is finally turning a corner, (for now anyways…) which I believe has contributed to my overly positive attitude these past few days. After several months of unfortunate circumstances and terrible weather I am finally awakening to a brighter and happier demeanor that, I have to admit, has been extremely difficult to achieve. Perhaps its all of the yoga that I have been doing that has assisted with my spiritual and emotional state that has transitioned from one of frustration and confusion to hope and tranquility.

Yesterday I was outside gazing into the clear sun, closing my eyes for a brief moment allowing this vivid light warm my body and soul, and I realized I finally accept the careless state of being in a world of uncertainty; I no longer have expectations of what tomorrow will bring, I am simply living my life through each passing moment without any sort of anticipation. I still struggle with an issue that has bogged my life for several years, and accept it is a lifelong battle, but feel as if I finally want to tread the waters of a calmer sea and free myself from the constraints and loneliness of a wearing existence.

I am not fooling myself however, I am still a very structured and organized person who does like to stick with her daily routine, but living with structure and neglecting the desire to understand the absurdity of life, and recognizing this law with ease and compassion, can coincide together. So have I become an enlightened individual? - Highly unlikely. I do believe I have come to an understanding, one that feels dream-like yet utterly real and I may be unable to explain to anyone so I shall remain silent.

Say Whaaaa Wednesday... The Art of Insanity

The Museum of Modern Art in Paris is not unaccustomed to exhibiting unusual works of art. However trivial, and incomprehensible, some of its exhibits may be I believe it is essential for the public to be exposed to all of the unique and ambiguous pieces that emerge in order for art to maintain its continual evolution.

So how does a screed of words carved into bedroom floorboards by a schizophrenic French farmer sound to you? In 2005 Paris’s MoMA showcased the 24ft by 9ft oak floorboards titled “Plancher de Jeannot” (Jeannot’s Floorboards) and created an unprecedented stir. The carvings consisted of 80 lines of text, in capital letters, no punctuation and referenced Hitler, several Popes and a satanic machine that the farmer (his surname and village where the floorboards were discovered have been kept secret) believed to control humans.

Jeannot, born in 1939, has an unfortunate background; his father committed suicide at a young age and shortly after Jeannot was institutionalized to a mental hospital (it took a team of 30 gendarmes to get him out of his home). His mothered died in 1971 which cause Jeannot to return to his village to assist in the burial. He insisted his mother be buried under the stairs in his mother’s house which was, oddly enough, carried through. It was then Jeannot moved his bed into the dinning room, next to the stairs, and began to furiously carve into the floor:
'Religion has invented machines for commanding the brain of people and animals and with an invention for seeing our vision through the retina uses us to do ill (...) the church after using Hitler to kill the Jews wanted to invent a trial to take power.’ It was only 7 months after his mother died that Jeannot starved to death

So can madness be artistic? The story is incredibly intriguing but I cannot help but wonder whether this type of exhibit is trying to liberate the unfortunate stigmatization associated with mental illness or exploiting it? The piece is strikingly beautiful; its sheer size is enough to make one’s mind wander into its own reverie of psychosis. However, the scripture is anything but romanticly insane in that artistic type of way, yah dig?

Say Whaaaa Wednesday: Painter, Baker, Candy Art Maker!

My wonderful, long time friend is currently interning in New York at The Museum of Modern Art (Much lurrrvvee Jory, you’re helping me climb back into a realm of inspiration!). She let me know of a delectably sweet artist who has an interesting artistic palette: creating paintings, sculptures that portray landscapes of cake, candy, fudge and other delicious confections.

Will Cotton is a New York based painter who not only paints such sugary swamps that occasionally include nude women but also sculpts gumdrop sculptures with slices of ganache cake and other sweets. Beautiful curvaceous women lay atop mountains of scooped ice cream that evaporates into blues and pink clouds. The women’s serene gaze embodies the blissful vision of the Renaissance artists who strived to immortalize a foreboding theme of heaven and gluttony.

I find Cotton’s work to be extremely intriguing and lack any preventative unfettering for the female body that the modern feminist may conjure up; I can imagine they believe he is equating the female body to the seductive and, commonly deemed voracious, allure of candy which I boldly refute (hey, that would be a good essay!). His work does bear the burden of seduction but it is masterfully complex and is delivered in a clean and reverential way that truly portrays his oil painting technique. Cotton’s paintings are remarkable in his ability to capture the Renaissance technique of foreshortening to create a sort of soft depth while revealing a uniquely modern concept.
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A Much Needed Update!! - A Poem

The Barren
By Jenna Reimer

In the end you are weary of this abandoned world.
Among your fetishes in a weak and soulless flame
That fume a sky of clouded doubt and unknown,
Where a fury of scarred electric stars and blazing moons
Exist in a furnace of cobalt and crimson hollows,
You tremble in a league admit a blinded fleet.
Drifting ashes brush the faces of preset men
Wanting to walk home and simply retire.
Yet, you launch into a solemn slumber,
Aloft the drift of deep delirium in an exiled sleep;
Dying in a tamed and watchful sorrow.

F*ck It Friday... A Poem

The Lattice
By Jenna Reimer

Unable to escape the lattice;
A net that remains a barricade
From all that is out of reach.
I peer through the mesh
Where crisscrossed shadows
Paint the floor of the other side;
Bleak Figures lurking amongst
This grounded darkness
Dash like a running hare
Leaving no trace of its presence.
Time running like the muddied waters
Of a February river
I cannot see through the murk.
The lattice is far too high to climb,
Too long to trek, too deep to dig.
To have these hands, these feet,
These eyes, this tongue
Are fruitless amid such uncertainty.
If I have learned anything in this life
It will be that there is no lucid light,
No clear shadow,
And an endless knowledge of doubt.

Say Whaaaa Wednesday... Beauty in Flames

I must go to this festival immediately; there is nothing more gratifying than seeing giant flames engulf a vacant sky and dancing around it like the free loving hippie we all claim we don’t want to be. Burning Man is a yearly event held in northern Nevada in the Black Rock Desert where thousands of people celebrate the summer solstice by burning strikingly large wooden sculptures. The ritual began in San Francisco in 1986 when a man burned a 9 foot wooden man, along with a wooden dog, on Baker Beach as a “spontaneous act of self expression.” Eventually this idea leaked into the Black Rock Dessert and became an annual event where thousands of people would showcase spectacular pieces of wooden sculpture.

This is where the innate hippie inside of me really gets excited and wants to rip off her clothes and dance around a bon fire naked to the music of The Grateful Dead on acid; yes, you read that correctly. I love the idea of “outsider art” coming together to create a visionary retreat of inspiration and creativity. Yah it’s kind of hippie-ish and I am sure there are some far out characters there who are still advocating issues that the contemporary world has long outgrown, but to all their own right? It’s those people who are great to hang out with because they lack the pretentious attitude of most of us modern people.

How marvelous it must feel to stand amongst a burning sculpture amidst an anxiously intoxicated crowd in a desolate dessert where the spirit of art and freedom are lucidly one…. Wow I need to stop now, the hippie lingo is starting to come up.

(Ecstacy by Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito 2009; Fire Of Fires by David Umlas, Marrilee Ratcliffe, Community Art Makers 2009)

F*ck It Friday... A Poem

Tree Figure
By Jenna Reimer

A tree stands before me;
Barren branches crowding a marked sky,
Unmoving below a merciless twilight,
I sit beneath it within the shadow of a wind.
Knowing all the things I have known once
Disappear into an entreated bliss.
The tree’s boughs grow into my breast,
Swallowing my limbs of fickle fury.
I was a tree among the woods.