Art

Day 8 – Progress

Upon completion of 25 detailed sketches I opened my laptop to write, instead I fell asleep with a one-eyed kitten licking my face at 3am. I began yesterday with 5 and remembering the vow I made on day 7 managed to generate enough strength to work continuously through the day and night.

The deterioration of energy through the pages from morning to early hours is obvious, even to the visually challenged feline. My question now is how next to proceed. I don’t have the funds to order canvas yet but somehow I still don’t feel ready for that step. However, my application to FundIt is now submitted so hopefully any of you out there who have faith in the exposition will stay tuned over the next couple of weeks as we endeavour together to memorialise these women.

So, over the next fortnight  I aim to study these faces, these files until my mind will allow no more and my eyes fail. To maintain passion, to maintain will and empathy as I wait to begin the real challenge is my goal. Hopefully, with all your help we can make this goal a reality and I will truly need all the support you can offer. We, a tiny group of individuals connected through cyber space, can furnish a tiny group of nameless, forgotten women with recognition, appreciation, love and most importantly a legacy that no one else is willing to provide.

But to do this will mean to encourage others, far and wide, to donate whatever little they can, no amount is too big or too small and each single euro is a step closer to remembering the people that everyone else has abandoned. I believe we can do this but it’s success solely depends on the efforts of the collective not the individual.

Day 5/6/7 – Drained

Firstly, I must apologise for lack of updates in the last two days. It seems that only now do I really understand what transitioning means. Between caring for an elderly cat after her surgery, fostering a severely abused kitten and returning to my job it’s been difficult not only to find time to post but even to sketch. So, in reality, Days 5 and 6 weren’t extremely productive.

Finding the strength to peruse the faces of the lost is a tricky process, one I’ve found nearly impossible to do when tired. It has not been so much about stretching my artistic muscles but my emotional ones. To detach but to feel, to concentrate and yet preserve sanity, to be invigorated yet maintain reverence has been a balancing act I have yet to master. The result? Absolute wipe-out.

I have the distinct sense that so far I have focused far too much on death. When originally this project was never meant to be about that at all, I even tried to avoid using the word. In one of my initial brain maps I laid out four words, four pillars that would support this task and unfortunately I have strayed, allowed these pillars to falter and to crack. You will see these words below, handwriting is far more effective then typed script.

At this point, on the official one week marker I must pilgrimage back to my origins, chant these words as mantra for the rest of this voyage and ensure, no, vow to not let this simply become the dead women project, excuse the crudity because at its very core this is so much more.

4xl

Day 4 – Transitions

In case any of you were wondering about yesterdays post, on the first official day of this project by 8pm I felt a sort of illness I had never quite experienced so I took pen to paper and within half an hour was able to accurately diagnose the feeling in my body. In writing I found the name that had evaded me. Today has very much been about getting into solid work. No more doodles, the blog is set, so is the twitter  ( https://twitter.com/Blinkx4L ) and now I have to prepare for the painting.

Studying the faces of 25 elegant, engaging, lost women has taken it’s toll. Working solidly on canvases or paper for 10, 12, 14 hours at a time is not unusual for me but this is something far different. I was only able to complete 4 sketches today and I felt drained.

I’m still shocked at how connected I feel to those I do not know. I can already feel the dangerous grasps of desensitization sinking in and although it would make my task far easier if I could objectify them as simple subjects I know it would abolish the purpose of Blink. Somehow, someway I must maintain and, in fact, embrace the squirming discomfort I felt upon viewing each of their beautiful faces for the first time.

What confuses and disturbs me most of all is how easily I have been able to transition back into normal life after working. At first it wasn’t easy, in fact it was nearly impossible, I became a woman obsessed but these transitions are becoming smoother. Of course, this is the human way. When faced with our own mortality through the loss of others we become disillusioned, questioning of our purpose and sometimes apathetic. But then this very human, very odd gene kicks in to make us forget, helps us ‘move on’ and numbs us to the undeniable, paralyzing fear of death.

Constant awareness of our own persistent proximity to death would undoubtedly force us into an impossible prison of fear. It would cripple us, preventing us from life and yes, in some ways kill us. I guess this is just another quirk of nature, an evolutionary response to the inability to live with the deadly thought of death clinging to our collective back like some sort of fatal parasite. We’re all a blink a way, it can’t be every blink, but it could be any blink. So all we can do is hope, hope is the gene that sheds the terror and keeps the monsters away at night and as long as hope prevails we can live each blink like there will never be a final one.

Day 3 – Why is it called Blink.?

To be named,
To be loved,
To be truly lost.
A barrel on a freeway
Eagles overhead
A nothing on no sidewalk.

Why to lose a life,
To lacerate a limb,
To char a thigh,
To expunge an eye,
In a Blink.

Strands, shackles, seemingly
Safe.
So easily frayed
Whisper, Shiver
Shards on the floor
Swept and discarded
Cells, strings seeping below the surface.

Surface strained by seconds,
minutes,
years,
until.

A living urn.
Flakes,
Follicles,
Pieces,
Scattered throughout time
Is this our legacy?
To live in dust.

Once shattered
Never Restored
To exist only in forgotten sprinkles
Between the grout
To glimmer in the sunrise
Never to be seen.

Humanity’s shards
Windswept and Grey
Locked in the genes
that will not come.

To lose the battle, yes,
But to lose the war-beaten soldiers of legacy,
This is effacement.
This is annihilation.
This is genocide.

No God for the Non-Existent
Who exists less than the nameless?
Was I ever here?
Or am I a chaotic formulation of ash?
An accident in a chaotic world.

I lay with the fox
the hare
the cat
and the mouse
Whose life water paints
your path home.

I lay with the amiable rat,
with your fridge,
you could have taken the cheese,
I have socks.

You’ve seen me,
I take my medicine
You walk her to school
I was she
I’m not alive now
Before I’ve died.

We checked in together.
I checked out alone.
Have fun in Orlando
While I sleep in the cold.

We swapped slots
I got the best seat home
I saw the sky
If it hadn’t been for the smoke.

But these are the lost,
The locked and Sterilised,
Without you, who’s to say I was ever there,
Or Anywhere.

Now, Blink.

©S.E Honan 2014