November 13, 2021

Love's Divine

by Gesso Cocteau in Blog

The Eisenhower Medical Center

" There are three kinds of dancers, those for whom dancing is physical exercise, those who dance to express their emotion, and those who hand over their bodies to the inspiration of the soul."-- Isadora Duncan

I love that quote because it resonates with my sculptures. I think to create one must give themselves to the inspired dreams and moments of their lives. We live in such a sterile world that we forget to listen to our wildness and our instincts. We are narrowed in mind by cultural rules and labels and can barely hear the whisper of the supreme force. When I sculpt I surrender my preconceived life and try to forget the taught technique and rules. I want to come from a more untamed and raw perspective. I want to energize my art with a sensation of living and unexpected oppositions and paradoxes.

We create to remember who we are, to reach back into our primordial genetic thoughts. The creative intellect is a shadow or our instinct. Art always consist of our memories, and usually a prayer to imitate something we remember in nature. We cannot trace the true origins or art, because it is the mythos of our souls who are the forerunners of our visions and creative dreams. There was a muddy center before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began.

I believe that all art comes from our primordial mud. That there is as Stanley Romaine Hopper wrote "a mythological consciousness that inspires us to create". Every human has her own personal intelligence, her own authentic and ancient dream. We know it when we hear or see or feel something that makes our blood run a little faster, our hearts beat somewhat louder, the quickening of the spirit. We are guided by that personal and private intelligence. It steers us and motivates us. It becomes our muse, our dream, our own intimate reality. Dreams and art transform us into our own conversation, our own individual existence. We are freed from stereotypical labels by reclaiming our own mythic function. Art helps us to do just that. Creativity points the way for us to our own personal freedom.

The sculpture for Eisenhower Hospital symbolizes healing and compassion. In this day and age we can all benefit from strong symbols depicting hope.

Keep the Faith ____

Gesso Cocteau

The Sculpture 'Love's Divine' can be seen at

Eisenhower Hospital in Rancho Mirage Ca.

In front of the Greg and Stacy Renker Pavilion.

April 20, 2025

The Whispering Shelves: From Alexandria's Dream to Reading in my Garden

The Whispering Shelves: From Alexandria's Dream to Reading in my Garden To my friends and family its well known that I love books. My Mom and my older sister passed that down to me. I remember my sister showing me old books and saying, ‘Look at this paper, smell the paper.” I was born into loving books. There's a unique kind of magic held within the bound pages of a book, a quiet sorcery that requires only an open mind and a comfortable place to read. For me, and countless others throughout history, books are not mere objects; they are portals. As the great astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." I feel this profoundly. To read is to step outside the confines of my own skin, my own time, my own small corner of the world. Reading allows my imagination to paint the picture of the words. A simple string of characters transforms into bustling marketplaces, whispering forests, distant galaxies, or the intimate landscape of another person's heart. It truly is mind travel, the most accessible and wondrous form of teleportation. Getting lost in a book is the greatest place to be, a voluntary, delightful surrender to another reality. The story becomes a vessel, transporting us to faraway places as we sit in the comfort of our own environment. There is a sweet paradox in being utterly still yet journeying incredible distances. And the sensory experience! It begins even before the first word is read. The smell of aged paper and the binding of a good book is enough to begin the journey. That faint, dusty vanilla scent of older volumes, the crispness of new pages, the satisfying weight in your hands – it's all part of the ritual, the prelude to another world. It primes the senses for the imaginative feast to come. Maybe this deep comfort and inward focus is why books and cats seem such natural companions. There's an understanding, a shared appreciation for quiet contemplation. As the saying goes, “What greater gift than the love of a cat?" – perhaps only the gift of a book, and ideally, both enjoyed together. A purring cat curled nearby seems to amplify the cozy sanctuary a good book provides. T.S. Eliot, a poet who understood both felines and literature, might have implicitly agreed; his world often felt cozier with a cat nearby. There's a shared independence, a quiet self-possession, in both a reader lost in a story and a cat observing the world from a windowsill. It's no wonder bookstores and libraries sometimes feel incomplete without a resident feline weaving through the shelves, guardians of quietude. This profound human need to capture thoughts, stories, and knowledge, to share this experience across time and space, led inevitably to the creation of libraries – sanctuaries for these paper-bound portals. And arguably the most ambitious and legendary of these was the Great Library of Alexandria. Founded in Egypt by Ptolemy I Soter or his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus in the 3rd century BC, the Library of Alexandria wasn't just a collection; it was a statement. Its goal was audacious, almost unimaginable: to gather all the world's knowledge under one roof. Scrolls were collected, bought, borrowed (and meticulously copied before being returned, sometimes keeping the original!), and even seized from ships docking in the harbor. It was part of a larger research institution called the Mouseion, dedicated to the Muses, the goddesses of the arts. Imagine the intellectual energy in those halls. Scholars from across the known world flocked there – mathematicians like Euclid, astronomers like Eratosthenes (who calculated the circumference of the Earth with astonishing accuracy), poets, physicians, inventors like Archimedes (though he primarily worked in Syracuse, he likely studied or corresponded with Alexandria). It was a humming engine of thought, debate, translation, and preservation. Estimates of its collection vary wildly, but it likely held hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls. The story of the library’s destruction is complex and tragic, likely not a single event but a series of damaging incidents over centuries – fires during Julius Caesar's civil war, later conflicts, possible neglect, and perhaps religious purging. Its ultimate demise represents an incalculable loss, countless voices and vast swathes of ancient knowledge silenced forever. Yet, the idea of the Library of Alexandria endures. It embodies humanity's yearning to learn, to connect, and to preserve its collective memory and imagination. Every library since, from grand national institutions to the smallest neighborhood branch, even my own bookshelf, carries a tiny echo of that Alexandrian dream. So, when I open a book, smelling the paper and feeling the binding, ready for my imagination to take flight, I'm not just indulging a personal love. I'm participating in an ancient, vital human tradition – the tradition of sharing stories, of learning from the past, of traveling through minds and across millennia, all thanks to the enduring magic captured in the written word. © Gesso Cocteau __for everyone who loves books__

April 19, 2025

A Dream

A Dream: The Omen in the Raven’s Wing The desert night is long, and in its depths, my garden becomes a mystical stage. Bronze figures loom in the moonlight, their silent gazes fixed on secrets only the wind knows. Here, among gnarled branches and the blooming leaves, I find myself in the company of shadows, most faithfully embodied by the ravens, owls and crows. These night birds are not simply muses: they are omens, harbingers of a truth both terrible and beautiful. They are the ink-stained souls moving with passion. They are not the bearers of simple inspiration, but the messengers of a darker and more beautiful fate. Life is not always the poetry born of joy, but sometimes birthed from sorrow, or the constant ache of existence. It is the shadow that lies at the heart of light. Think of the raven in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ He asks the raven a question of great and sorrowful importance and the raven only says, “Nevermore” leaving the poet with great sadness and never-ending angst. I, to seek answers from these midnight visitors. I sit in my studio, the large sliding doors framing a landscape drenched in the melancholy of twilight and wait for the words to come. They arrive on the breath of something hidden, in the rasping caw of a crow, or in the unsettling silence that precedes a raven’s flight. But there is always an ambiguity, a sense that the message is not entirely for me, that it’s a fragment torn from a larger, unknowable story. “The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.” The poet Wallace Stevens offers a glimpse of something profound, but it is fleeting. The river of time carries us inexorably toward the unknown. And these blackbirds, they remind us of this. They are a constant token of the ephemeral nature of beauty. The blackbirds circle, and they will find you. Perhaps they are psychopomps, guides to a realm I am not yet ready to enter. Or perhaps they are simply reminders that even in this private garden, amidst the abundance of life, death is always present, waiting. The poetry that comes to me in these hours is not gentle. It is a brutal excavation, a tearing away of the veil to reveal the raw, unflinching truth. It demands a reckoning with loss, with the inevitable decay of all things. And the ravens and crows, they are the witnesses to this struggle, their obsidian eyes reflecting the darkness I find within myself. I am the garden, and the Blackbird are poems with wings. I don’t seek solace in my poetry. I find clarity. The ravens and the crows are not comforters, they are agents of the Fates. They remind me of the fragility of existence, the inevitability of loss. And in their presence, I am allowed to confront my own personal shadows. The messenger, the Blackbird has come, and he will come again and again and again. This is why I write poetry. Words and image © Gesso Cocteau 2025

March 29, 2025

The Owl

The Owl I wanted to find a reason why I disappeared. Then the owl came circling my thoughts ___ seducing my mind slowly subtly coming closer. Perched upon a broken branch, his indifference abstract and imposing revealed my need for meaning, for dark quiet places of intensity. Sometimes I feel myself dissolving into space, I get smaller and smaller until I no longer exist. (meanwhile) ____ the self shaped by desire exposed by my insatiable need moves ever closer to the fire. But nothing will keep us alive. I dreamt I asked the fates why I was being driven by transitory lust. (the fates answered) “Meaning only exists when you are looking for it, it will tempt you like a lover and leave you like a beggar.” And I thought to myself god, isn’t this what living is? The wanting that feeds you the raging storm that seduces you and always the need for more. I love the way we hungered for one another the sensuality, the greed and the thirst. Our bodies wrapped in the animalism of urge the predatory talons of infatuation. Then I realized what nourishes us also destroys us. I have felt my life unwind like threads, pulling me forward and backward, until it’s hard to put the pieces back together. Tonight, the gilded owl called out my name, his voice so familiar, his eyes dark and sad. ___ did you even notice I disappeared? Gesso Cocteau 2025

Love's Divine

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