Scattered Light: May 2011

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Saturday, May 28, 2011

I just finished my first painting using my new easel, bought with my COG grant:. The easel's roomy and nothing tilts! I don't have to hang onto it with one hand in order to keep it steady. Thanks again, AoRC.

Lately I’ve begun to merge the figurative with the abstract in my work. Miles Davis’ jazz fusion, Turner’s mature work of storms, fire and vague buildings in the background, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles ’d Avignon, Kandinsky’s improvisations, Gorky’s subliminal imagery combined with lyrical color, DeKooning with his women’s series –all used figuration and abstraction, and serve as my models. Themes of pursuing vision—trying to see what blocks understanding; entrapment; relationships between people -- are all subjects for my work, and lend themselves to oil paint because it has fluidity. Since it doesn’t dry too fast, I can go from one space to another, one shape to another, and that allows me to show a metamorphosis from space to image, tracking my thought processes.

Science interests me, its controlled randomness -- like the somewhat unpredictable trajectory of an electron or the element of chance in natural selection, or a Degas where the figures (dancers) are arranged in what seems to be a sort of randomness, but the composition is still very much controlled. There is some chance in my drawings when I put white acrylic over gray chalk and charcoal and end up in a fit of pique, slashing the white with more charcoal and finish up with a texture and a degree of dark- light that works well with the whole drawing. That moment of chance is stored as experience.

Music inspires me – Hendrix, Miles Davis, Waits, classical music. Music creates an environment that allows an image to pop into my head. It's not a completely formed image. I don't want it to be. I want something spontaneous to happen when I start to draw or paint. After losing and getting back the drawing many times, and developing the space, I can recapture the original image. German Expressionists like Gorky, Max Ernst, Schiele, Bacon, and most especially Munch have influenced my work greatly. I'm not completely an expressionist, though. There's objectivity and logic and subjectivity in the space I create, and some realism in the image, usually a head. So I'm not entirely self-indulgent and personal!

Back to work...

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Books to the Rescue

The Writer’s Lair Books is launching a 72-Hour “Books to the Rescue” Fundraiser starting at 12:01am EST TOMORROW May 26, 2011 and ending 11:59pm EST May 28, 2011 to support the Severson Sisters Foundation, a foundation dedicated to ending bullying and inspiring girls towards authenticity and confidence.

Carrie Severson founded Severson Sisters with the idea that cultivating creativity helps to eliminate peer pressure and forge what she calls a Supergirl. Carrie posits that artistic outlets not only give girls a place to express themselves and to flourish, but also allows for girls to better connect with one another in what she calls sisterhoods. Their mission to end bullying falls right in line with the anti-bullying we promote with our book, Flightless Goose. Consider buying any book in our bookshop to support the Severson Sisters Foundation. Let us know you are for the “Severson Sisters Fundraiser” at checkout. A portion of each book sold will be donated to this organization.

We know that helping young girls is motivation enough, but we thought we’d throw in some prizes to thank you for your help. At checkout, the buyer will list both ‘Severson Sisters Foundation’ and from which blog they heard about the fundraiser. From this data, we will tally the top three bloggers and award them one of the following prizes:

First Place Prize:
$50 giftcard to Amazon.com

Second Place Prize:
A gift basket including a signed copy of our book Flightless Goose, the book’s audio CD, an Illustory kit that lets children publish their own hard copy children’s book, and other summertime goodies

Third Place Prize:
A copy of our exciting and fun novel entitled Shiva’s Arms, which dramatizes the clash of cultures in a family

Those Important Details:
1. All sales must be through our website .

2. For more information, go here

Be sure to check out the Severson Sisters Foundation. Thank you, in advance, for helping us support the Severson Sisters Foundation and helping to build Supergirls!

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Bob Dylan Screen Test 1965

Monday, May 23, 2011

Alberto Ginastera: Concerto for Piano No.1 (Movement I)

Saturday, May 21, 2011

MC ESCHER

Janet bought a book on MC Escher at the museum, and the drawing of hands drawing one another was in it, among so many other wonderful things.

Fusion: art and poems (Volume 1)

Friday, May 20, 2011

Recipes for Poets

In honor of Deb Ager's foodie event, here's our contribution--
Shundal (a traditional snack for the Indian women’s festival of Golu)
2 C cooked garbanzo beans
½ C grated coconut
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tablespoon urad dal (white gram beans)
1 chili, chopped or grated
salt to taste
1 tsp turmeric

In a pan, heat the oil. Add mustard seeds, and fry. Remember to put a lid on the pan while the seeds are frying—they pop. Reduce to medium heat, add the urad dal, and cook to golden brown. Add turmeric. Add the chili. Sauté the garbanzo beans for five minutes. Add coconut.

Figure with Yellow Back

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Our New Facebook Page

Scattered Light
Hope you "Like" it!

Sunday, May 15, 2011

My Dripping Brain

"Janet's compelling, expressionistic paintings complement Cheryl's poems. Those paintings make the noise of the world instantly go silent...haunting, improbable, fascinating, complex images. Those poems cast to the reader quixotic observations, existential moods, amorous enigmas."

Thanks to musician and writer Tim Buck for this wonderful mention. My sister and I have come to count on his trenchant observations and penetrating opinions on music, art,and writing. Did he say anything about this? we ask one another when we post a new piece. If he did, we know we are on the right track.

Honorable Mention

She Spits Melancholy at Him won an honorable mention at the AoRc show! For that, and the COG grant, a big thank you.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Seated Woman with White Arm

Friday, May 13, 2011

Funny face

Thursday, May 12, 2011

He Gives Her Bad Advice

...don't worry -- it's nobody you know

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Artist with Worried Sister

Saturday, May 07, 2011

Fusion

Janet and Cheryl Snell are pleased to announce the publication of their collection Fusion,a series of expressionist drawings accompanied by poems derived from the image.
Available in these formats:
Paperback
Hardcover
Free download

Thursday, May 05, 2011

Portrait of Cheryl

What They Say

The Blend of Visual and Written Art

THAT FEEL is one of the finest collaborative books published by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell is a fine poet and her sister Janet Snell is a fine expressionist artist. In their previous books there was often the question of whether Janet was illustrating Cheryl's poetry or if perhaps each artist made her art and then combined it in the most suitable manner.

Now it is obvious that the art that spreads across both sides of an open book is unified and equally involved in the nidus of expression. The poems and art of THAT FEEL seem to be more visceral than those that came before them - these are poems from the gut, art about alienation and longing and rapturous moments that fade too quickly (or were they even there?). For example in the combined expression of the following, the painting accompanying the poem is that of two faces distorted by reflection in glass or mirror or memory:

REFLECTIONS IN CRACKED GLASS

Each brush stroke had been its own allegory

and could not reconcile the break. I felt for

connection in blind corridors, whispering

Who's there? from within the room's glass

eye.

Maybe I was dreaming. The facts were hard

to parse and sometimes lied. I did, too,

confused by what my reflection showed. The

glass distorted it and the fissure widened from

a thin red line. It splintered our embrace and

again I was alone.

The book may be brief but it is a powerful one. The only criticism about this latest opus is the somewhat disjointed feeling of the varying fonts or typefaces the artists used. Those wide variations of print diminish the tone of the poetry/art like unwanted audience distracters. But that is a minor complaint in a book that further substantiates the excellent collaborative efforts of the sisters Snell. --Grady Harp

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review)
by Matthew Biberman

Any one who frequents the fiction section of a good independent bookstore knows that there is something of a cottage industry of writers currently churning out fiction invested in capturing the lived experience of ex‐pat Indians who have moved to America. One of the more distinctive elements of this sub‐genre is its investment in detailing life in India as well as in America, most often in ways that include, often in great detail, the back stories of the
characters before their decision to move away from their home land.
A recent addition to this stack of books is Cheryl Snell’s first novel, Shiva’s Arms. I know and admire Cheryl first and foremost as a poet, a fact that inevitably colored my reading of this book. Indeed I would encourage anyone who begins Shiva’s Arms to keep this fact in mind because I believe it influences the writing of this novel all the way down to its essence. Cheryl’s poetic eye is not just visible in the felicitous phrase, though the book is filled with such moments. A conversation in an Indian cab takes place in a dialect that sounds “like gravel in their mouths.” When a character unravels, we see that her eyes are “blue puddles in her slack face.” Food gets sopped up “in a baseball mitt” of bread. But to read Shiva’s Arms for its precise, poetic imagery is to skate along an iced over lake without any thought to the depths below.
The true challenge of Shiva’s Arms is to recognize that it is a very ambitious—indeed, innovative piece of writing. It is an experiment in what I would call a transversal novel. Shiva’s Arms takes shape somewhere between the sonnet craze that swept Shakespeare’s England four centuries ago and the cinematic techniques often identified as producing the Rashomon effect in twentieth century avant garde film.
First we must think about that now largely obsolete form—the sonnet sequence. Generally understood to have been popularized by Petrarch with his love poems to Laura, the sonnet sequence flourished in the late sixteenth century in London. Shakespeare’s effort is a very late example, and perhaps for that reason, breaks new ground. For the first time, the poet is repeatedly identified with the speaker of the poems (think of all those puns on Will) and the beloved is not simply idealized (famously, her eyes are nothing like the sun) but also unfaithful. Nor is the narrative clear. When you read Shakespeare’s poems it is as if you are reading a novel in snap shots, but with this twist: as you read it dawns on you that somehow the poems are no longer in chronological order
While keeping that experience in mind, let us flash forward to the art house movie. Famously, Kurosawa made a film‐‐Rashomon (1950) that retells a crime from four different perspectives, a device that highlights the complex and dynamic nature of reality. What the Rashomon effect
highlights is the truth that though reality is intersubjective (that is, reality is a collective formation), this “collective hallucination” (to use Freud’s term) is inevitably being made by individuals who are experiencing what is happening in ways that are always at once congruent and divergent.
What Cheryl has done in Shiva’s Arms is to present the story of an extended family in a novel that combines both of these techniques. The result can be described as a novel where each chapter operates as a kind of intense short poem, that is‐‐ as a sonnet. The chapters do not,however, anchor the reader to one character. Rather, the reader is passed from character to character. We begin tied to the American Alice, but then pass on to her husband Ram, and then their child Sam. This primary pattern is however interrupted with detours into Ram’s mother Amma, and ‐‐ with increasing frequency as the book builds to its conclusion ‐‐ the shunned sister Nela. With each shift, a different perspective is showcased. In strategy, the result is reminiscent of some of our most celebrated modernist novels, books such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come immediately to mind. But in those works, the effect encourages the reader to separate out the characters so that the readers gains a satisfying sense that people are unique, yet isolated, grounded but limited to their bodies.
The effect that Snell produces in Shiva’s Arms is striking because it works in reverse. People in families get caught up in each other so that the configurations shift and change. Suddenly the notion that we are limited to our physical bodies falls away. We meld in our struggles, mix and combine in ways that defeat the macro laws of physics both in terms of space and even time. In this, Snell’s work is reminiscent of Djuna Barnes cult masterpiece Nightwood, though the overall mood is far more evocative of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
For me the high points of Shiva’s Arms come when Snell renders the rapid blooming of a state of existential dread. The effect is positively unsettling in its intensity, most especially early in the novel after Alice’s marriage precipitates a psychological crisis. The concluding confrontation between Amma and Alice is even more impressive, coming as it does so effectively after the dramatic resolution of the dinner immediately preceding it. Fights in Shiva Arms do not end with characters walling themselves off. Everything drives toward mixture, a fact highlighted by Ram when he observes that “we are all just chemistry labs.” This theme is made overt via the role food plays in this novel complete with Recipes, a crowning touch.
According to western cliché, cooking and food illustrate how each of us enjoys a unique and colorful heritage of goodness. True to its radical nature, Shiva’s Arms upends that idea and puts in place the notion that each of us is but an ingredient, a blend that makes up the bigger whole.
Shiva’s Arms is a satisfying novel that demands much from its reader. Its strengths are many but if I had to pick one on which to end I will stress that this is a book that provocatively challenges many of the most cherished presumptions propping up many well known examples of Indian – American fiction, or indeed of multicultural literature generally speaking. Despite paying lip service to the idea that western notions of subjectivity are not universal, most writers working in the genre of the English novel continue to present nonwestern forms of consciousness via free standing western characters. In stark contrast, Shiva’s Arms invites you to imagine characters that are interconnected parts of a larger whole. Such a radical insight can only come from a novelist of great talent and skillful execution. With luck, future novels from Cheryl Snell will deepen this exploration. As a reader I certainly look forward to the adventure.

Prisoner's Dilemma:...The diction here, precise and yet off-hand, coupled with the unexpected coupling of ideas (beauty – rivers – the girl who knows all the boys desire her) places Snell on intimate relations with the main currents of twentieth century American poetry, a landscape marked by masters such as John Ashberry, Mark Strand, Louise Bogan and Louise Gluck, to name but a few poets associated with the style Alan Williamson (himself a fine poet) dubbed the new American surrealism. And yet Snell—or rather the Snells—for the book I am reviewing, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, is a collection that alternates between Cheryl’s short lyric poems and Janet’s pencil drawings -- stands apart.

The difference is hard to explain, so lets be blunt: in the best of Cheryl’s work, the style regains its vigor, enlivened by the poet’s deep sense of what it means to be caught up in life. A digression on Freud may help here because we are on the subject of digressions. Freud could never stop being fascinated by the notion that it is life that is the interruption. Not death. The immortal is the natural state. But somehow we find ourselves shunted and routed out of the immortal and into the detour of the mortal for a brief go round before flowing back into the immortal, back into death, and the beyond of death. Cheryl Snell’s poetry, and Janet’s art, together illuminate this insight: that the detour into life is a circular whirlpool. --Matthew Biberman

It could be the case that those human heads are floating in a paradoxical space: yes, obviously human (and all that that signals to us) but also pure moments of form. Cephalic shapes to circumscribe color-vacuums, lending force to the other “objects.”Another impression jumps into my own head, beyond what I said above about...well, whatever it was I said. For me, I feel like I'm looking at a negative-image of consciousness. The subconscious? Maybe. And what's weird and cool is that those heads, drained of color and feature detail, seem to express more human soulfulness and depth than even a portrait by Rembrandt!...Tim Buck

There is something of Keats's “negative capability” revealed in this poignant story: it is a mystery to me how a female author can so perfectly inhabit the hurting corners of a middle-aged man's soul. And her striking turns of phrase bring delight to the reader, even as he squirms and winces in sympathy with Roger...Tim Buck

The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope...Rosy Cole

...This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE. ---Grady Harp

Marilyn Kallet, on Multiverse:
"Cheryl Snell's poems are rich, integrative, witty, and beautifully composed."

This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance. Memento Mori is a tour de force. (R.Cole)

"... Both Snells' (author and painter) works soar in this lovely book. It was interesting to watch the movement of fear between the poems...A nervous and wonderful collection of art fused with poetry."--Andrew Demcak, on Multiverse

Dorothy Shin, Akron Beacon Journal--
"Her work is dark,mysterious, seemingly drawn from the subconscious...Foreboding, regret, entrapment, longing and enigma vie for prominence while gestural, expressive brushwork gives the forms a supernormal tension and energy..."

Bob Grumman, Taproot--"Macabre, comic, mysterious, and subtly erotic, these fascinating drawings constantly flirt with disgust -- a perfect example of graphic black humor. "

"A series of charcoal drawings that go darkly anywhere via an expressionism that reminds me of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. Snell provides poems for her illustrations that generally extend rather than just rephrase them-- ."

... varied and beautifully imaged lyric narratives...Again, she stuns us with her imagery.---Comstock Review

Scattered Light