Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar is an African-American poet from the late 1800s is one of Maya Angelou's favorites. This poem is where she drew the title of her autobiography, I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS.

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;

When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals --
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting --
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, --
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings --
I know why the caged bird sings!

Rainbow in the Clouds

One of the things I’ve been wondering about is what it looks like to be a female voice of influence and empowerment in the world. I feel that I’ve been enculturated to think that to be feminine in the larger society is to be objectified, frivolous, weak, even altogether irrelevant. In the past, my solution to this was to extract the feminine out of my voice, or at least to present it with enough academic qualifiers to justify its presence. Recently, though, I’ve been wondering what it looks like for a woman to maintain her sense of self (not just as a female but her whole self of which her gender is one aspect) and command others’ attention and respect.

Last Friday, I went to hear Maya Angelou speak at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I was working as a press guide for the Oscars last week so it was a bit of a to-do to rush to Downtown from Hollywood on time after my shift. I got there fine, though, and I felt a sort of wonderful, melancholic solitude as I insulated myself against the wind in my ratty coat. Hope Street was so deserted and quiet as I marched up the hill to the Music Center but the Pavilion itself was abuzz with families, friends and couples lining up to get in. Sometimes there's such a pleasure in getting lost in the crowd.

I was so exhausted and worried that I wouldn't be able to focus. I was at the edge of my seat through the whole talk, though, and the exhaustion just made me emotionally open – I pretty much wept through the whole thing.

Maya Angelou’s presence was so magnetic. She got a standing ovation as soon as she appeared on stage. Her voice was so commanding and yet so at ease. She knew herself and her place in the world. She was at complete peace and yet not resigned or complacent. Her knowledge and her peace had movement. She not only moves herself through the world but she clearly causes movement in others too.

She spoke of how, in Genesis, God gave his people the gift of the rainbow to ease their worries that the rain would never stop. She spoke of how one can see rainbows even in the clouds, that even though the rain hasn't completely stopped, there is the hope that it will someday. Then she spoke of those who were rainbows throughout her life, and how she strives to be a rainbow for those who are lost in the tumult of life. How all of us can and must be rainbows in the clouds for others. Maybe it sounds cheesy but the way she spoke of these things was so grounded in the timeless truth of humanity and its needs that she cut through whatever cynicism we are accustomed to exulting as reality, intellect, enlightenment. I think this is why I wept.

Untitled, 02/11/07

Untitled (cuz a title was never discussed), 2007. Oil pastel and carbon on canvas, 36" x 50".

So ... this is the drawing that the illustrious Young Mi Chi and I collaborated on. It's all oil pastel and pencil. We went nuts all over the canvas with the pearly irredescent oil pastel, though you can't really tell from the photo. I'm going to try to post some details later but if you want to see the drawing in person, come to the Mayan on Sunday.

Click on the image for a (slightly) larger version.

Memories and Cravings

Goal for the foreseeable future: baby steps. Meaning, 1 “art activity” every 2 weeks. Then thoughts about said art activity. Embarrassingly basic and minimal but must remember: baby steps. I meant to go to LACMA to check out the Magritte show last week (really interested in how John Baldessari installed the show) but I didn’t get around to it. You know how life can be, sometimes.

I did collaborate on a drawing with a friend of mine, an artist named Young Mi, yesterday at Mosaic. She would very likely squirm at that description – it’s funny how we're so capable of extending such monikers on others and how difficult it is to accept them ourselves. Anyway, I drove up to Oregon along the PCH once, videotaping the view out the window. Something about capturing moments while willingly trapped in a car fascinates me. I never did anything with the footage I took then, but recently I elonaged a 10-minute piece from Big Sur to about an hour. Young Mi and I projected it onto a canvas from behind and then drew on the surface with cray-pas while the video was playing. It definitely had a huge performance element to it, which unnerved us and yet energized us at the same time. We'd tried it once before, but that time the work never took flight from interesting concept to compelling end-product. I think it was due to lack of strategic dialogue about logistics and such. I guess we realized this but still felt ok – because it was so much about performance and real-time, it was good to just "do it" in order to figure things out. At any rate, we talked through things a great deal this time around and I believe the drawing was stronger and more successful because of it. We also felt much more comfortable drawing and working side-by-side this time around since the getting-to-know-you element of the original effort was out of the way (we've collaborated on lots of things but never in a way where the interaction was so immediate and time-sensitive). In fact, I reneged on the original idea of taking turns drawing to allow each other the whole canvas at a given time. I hope Young Mi didn’t mind. I couldn’t help but jump in. Being so invested in the process, it was difficult to sit back as ideas and general enthusiasm got the better of me. We ended up having some technical difficulties but I think the work we produced is very cohesive. It was about loss, love, journey (both physical and symbolic) and alienation filtered through childhood memories.

It felt great to DRAW. And it felt great to produce something that was attractive. It felt great to CREATE, as cheesy as that sounds.