Tag: drawing

Cinematic dreams

Katharine Asals13 Comments

The taxi driver refused to go any further.
I was staying at a hotel near Spadina and College – El Mocambo territory – and wanted to get further down towards Dundas, into the deep and winding medieval streets, but the driver turned the car around and let me out, saying “most people don’t want to go down there – it’s too dangerous”.

In the dream, downtown T.O. was like one of those neighbourhoods in Mexico City – Colonia Doctores or Ciudad Neza  – where all taxi drivers refuse to enter cause anything could happen.
So I got out and walked.
The streets were deserted and dark, and I walked and walked, way south, walking all night until I got down near the very bottom of the city, almost to the waterfront, where the sky was wide and the road opened up into a kind of rock quarry or a crumbling Colosseum, a part of the city that had long been abandoned and was just big open empty raw spaces  –

I ventured up onto the first layers of the rocks, rambling happily until I sensed movement in the shadows of the quarry. And as I looked, creatures took shape.
They were lions – stone lions.
They were living animals – their large bodies moving and rummaging about – but they were made of stone, the same stone of the the quarry.

At just the moment that it registered in my mind what I was seeing and the danger I was in, a large lion sensed me too, the hint of movement in his peripheral vision, and his head snapped up in a snarl.
Then there was a pounce, the running jump of the massive creature coming after me.

big biting lion

Suddenly I had a large plywood board in my hands which I lay underneath in a crevice in the rocks, pulling the board flat on top of me, effectively disappearing into the ground.

The lion lumbered heavily over me, not finding me, scrambling over and away, somewhere beyond where I lay hidden.
The fear was so huge – one of those nightmares that wakes you up in a sweat, blinking in the dark of the bedroom.

* * *

Today I had one of those days, out and about in the ‘hood and, while taking photos of the various construction and rehabilitation projects happening all around us here, here down at the bottom of the city, in an area that had been abandoned for decades, I remembered this dream again.

A dream from more than 10 years ago.

What I still don’t quite understand is where does this dream exist in time?

Because it’s as if some part of the dream knew where I was going more than 5 years before I moved here, before our building was built, before this abandoned part of the city was on its way to being brought back to life.

But now, having remembered the dream, and feeling as if I am somehow somewhere inside of it, I remember also some of the wise words of Robert Moss regarding the animals we meet in dreams :

Our animal guardians are hunting us in our dreams. If we will only stop running away, brave up, and remember, we can claim their power …

Lens Artists Challenge – Cinematic

Bold & reckless

Katharine Asals8 Comments

I’d signed up for a Sketchbook Challenge – something to carry me through the holidays, when I had a feeling things might be a bit challenging, a bit daunting – there was the personal level of things shaping up to be tough, but of course there had also been that election in the States, and as much as we would all like to pretend it’s just politics, in another country, not here… Yah. Whatever. It’s been a lot.

Anyways, a little creative challenge that would engage me on a daily rhythm but had no ambitious trappings to it felt just right.

At the beginning of course you are instructed to Find Your Why. And the main Why I found was an intention to push to be bold and reckless and experimental, to be messy and try things. To try things and fail at them. After all, it’s just a sketchbook.

So I went with that, and for days and days I did free and loose and messy and anything goes…

Bit by bit, the looser things got, the more I longed for structure, and I found myself drawing some objects, specific things over and over again –

How much the same thing can be so different every time…

Somewhere along the way, without really thinking about it, I felt like I needed to be doing something bigger – big drawings. Just being in the groove, rolling with the constant practice, it felt like putting a bit sheet of paper on the wall and drawing with charcoal would satisfy some kind of longing, so I did it.

The paper is somewhere around 4 ft x 4 ft.

Looking back now I kind of love that early phase where it’s not quite clear what is where and what’s going on, but I kept on going.

And ended up with this.

But maybe especially as it was an evolution from the daily scribbly sketchbook drawings, it feels like this is maybe just the first one of many…

Lens Artists Challenge – Bold

Things making me smile

Katharine Asals2 Comments

Things making me smile recently include…

The Lake. The lake, forever the lake.

Also.

An outing to the market, and an older fellow who I point at to draw his attention to the fact that we both are wearing plaid “shackets”, smiles and throws obscure accented phrases back at me. Twenty minutes later I see him again, walking the other way, and we both laugh and toss a few more cryptic phrases at each other – misunderstanding each other in words, but smiling all the way.

Lunch with a friend and she shows me her latest painting. The vibrant spirit of it. In a series of texts with another friend she sends me pix of various lanterns and light makers she’s been working on. The joy of sharing creative projects with friends who get it, friends who listen and remember, friends who say things that hit you sideways and help you think.

Still and again, in the middle of the day, this wholly absolutely irresistible tune –

The deep but quiet private joy, that for a few weeks now there’s been time to sketch on a daily basis, and the pleasure of surrendering to it, the daily question of what next, and of drawing and drawing and drawing…

Good drawings, bad drawings, whatever. Just drawing drawing drawing.

Hours spent at the little red kidney table by the windows, and for a moment around dusk, I look out at the sky beyond my table and whaddya know.

Circling.

A hawk.

The effortless soar. So high it’s hard to tell if it’s above the Gardiner or maybe floating above the park along Esplanade.

The joy of birds, of flight.

Earlier in the week, out by the water, by the sugar dock. Seagulls everywhere, thrilling to the scent of sugar in the air as a ship unloads.


Simple pleasures.

And then, in the midst of everything, absolutely every friggin thing going down in the strange strange world that is our modern existence, there is this hilarious yet deadly serious quote rediscovered:

Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.

~ Wendell Berry

Lens Artists – This Made me Smile