Artist Journal
Aspasia
What I Once Believed Three Movements I. What I Believed I thought the gods were generous, that Demeter's grief was temporary, that the seeds held more than they spent, that even the underworld gave back what it took. I believed love was a country you could learn the language of, that the body was a door and not a burning house, that hunger, if you fed it honestly, would one day fold its hands. I was that girl standing at the river's edge naming the water as if names were enough. The light on the surface so bright I mistook it for depth. II. What Life Revealed The fracture was not sudden. It came the way rivers carve stone, slowly, with great patience, until one morning you look down and see the canyon you are standing in. I learned that Orpheus turned around not from weakness, but from love that couldn't believe in what it couldn't see. I have turned around. I have lost what I turned to look at. I have kept walking anyway. I named each one carefully, the way you name a river before you cross it. The naming changed nothing. I crossed anyway. Time is not a healer. Time is just the light that keeps changing on the same still water. III. What Remains What remains is this body, still capable of heat, still moving toward light the way water moves, not because it chooses but because it is water. I have become Aspasia, not the woman who was forgotten but the dragon she becomes in the long telling: clawed, necessary, curled around the one bright thing she will not relinquish. I know now that shadow and light are not opposites. They are the same hand writing the same word in two different inks. What I believe now is smaller and more durable, the way bronze outlasts the sculptor, the way a raven knows without being told that the carcass is also a feast. I am still here. Still sensual, still seeking, still that girl at the river, only now I know the light on the surface is also beautiful even if it is only surface. Even the surface holds the sky. Dragon Sculpture and Poem © Gesso Cocteau
Love's Divine
Love’s Divine There are moments when the body forgets its boundaries. I have seen it. I have felt it. And I have tried, with bronze, to hold that fleeting truth. In Love’s Divine, I was not sculpting an embrace. I was searching for the moment just before it, the instant where two beings are no longer entirely separate, yet not fully joined. That threshold has always fascinated me. It is where love lives most vividly. Not in completion, but in the becoming. I elongated their forms deliberately. I wanted the figures to resist weight, to rise out of it, as though gravity itself had loosened its claim. When we fall into love, we are not heavy, we are lifted. Our bodies remember something lighter, something unbound. I wanted the bronze to remember that too. They do not stand firmly on the earth. They balance on intention. On desire. On the invisible force that draws one soul toward another. The base holds them, yes, but only just. Everything above it is reaching. And that reaching is everything. I have always believed that love is not a static thing. It is movement. It is a current. When I shaped their bodies into arcs, I was following that current, letting it guide the line, the tension, the space between them. That space is not empty. It is alive. It is where the energy gathers, where emotion becomes almost visible. That is the true subject of the piece. Not the figures themselves, but what exists between them. There is a music there. I felt it as I worked, something distant, almost remembered, like a melody carried in their bodies. They move toward each other as if they are listening to it, as if they have no choice but to follow it. Not hurried. Not hesitant. Certain. Above them, I imagined a sky breaking open. Not with destruction, but with illumination. Lightning as revelation. The kind of knowing that arrives without language, without permission, and changes everything. They form an arch, yes, but not one I constructed. It revealed itself. A bridge between two beings, each shaping themselves in response to the other. Not symmetry. Harmony. In my work, I often think about how bronze remembers fire. It is never entirely still. It holds within it the memory of transformation. In Love’s Divine, I wanted that memory to remain active, so that the figures feel as though they could still move, still soften, still become. Because love is never finished. It does not live in possession. It does not live in arrival.It lives in the reaching. As a sculptor, I do not believe I create that space.I enter it. And if I am fortunate, if I am listening closely enough, I can bring something back from it. Something that allows another to stand before the work and remember. Not the idea of love.But the feeling of it. The moment where time dissolves, where the world falls away, and there is only that luminous pull toward another being. Where we do not lose ourselves. We rise beyond ourselves. And for an instant, we knowwe were never truly separate. Essay and Sculpture © Gesso Cocteau
Imagination
Imagination “If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” – Émile Zola Imagination is the light that gives passion to our lives. To imagine is to lift ourselves beyond the constraints of the mundane and into the world we dream and imagine. As children, we fly on the wings of our dreams, unburdened by the weight of reality. In childhood, imagination is the key to looking at things differently. When we are young, we have a natural love for daydreaming. Pablo Picasso wrote, “Every child is an artist; the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” Creativity blooms from the fertile soil of imagination, implanting originality into our actions. It’s the fresh blood flowing in our veins, invigorating every endeavor with uniqueness. Imagination pulls people out of the depths of depression and psychological distress by removing the fear factor. It changes our perspective, infusing life with hope and possibility. The freedom of expression in our dream world cultivates a positive attitude. Imagination allows us to explore and express without bounds, nurturing a sense of joy and optimism. The great artist poet William Blake wrote, “The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.” When you nurture your imagination, you hold the universe in your hands. Dream and let your imagination take flight, explore realms beyond the ordinary. Remember, we are what we think about ourselves, and whatever we can imagine holds the potential to become reality one day. Imagination is brilliance playing without any rules! Be a dreamer. Let your imagination soar, chase the shadows it casts on the earth. Always remember “the most beautiful things we can experience is the mysterious.” Imagination is magic! © Gesso Cocteau
Thinking of my Husband
MY HUSBAND I live everyday with the taste of him upon my flesh. His scent and his voice whisper to me throughout the day, and when we stand together our shadow is one. I love him because he is rare, because he kisses me until the sun comes up and because he is dangerous and impossible because I never want to wake up from this dream without him. Excerpt from the poem ‘My Husband’ 2024 Gesso Cocteau©
You, the Birds, and I
You, the Birds, and I You had written ____ I remember the words like music falling upon my skin. You said you knew me, ___and the poems I wrote for you were markers like leaves in the wind showing us the movement of our lust. I perceived you as if you were with me in the garden laying next to me between night and the earth. The moon’s sojourn had begun and we were part of that journey. Who could say if this was a dream or real? And I would unfold my body into yours, where I belong beneath the hands of your words, conducting my emotions. Rising and falling watching the stars knowing we are timeless coherent and open. I am thinking ____ you the birds and I beneath the darkened midnight sky. Night ____ night. © Gesso Cocteau “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.” ― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Beyond The Mystery
I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” I have often thought that mystery is at the heart of creativity. When we let go of process and we can fall into the stream of creating we express the curiosity of mystery. For me, the act of sculpting carries a sacred resonance. I become the clay and the tools as my hands decipher dreams and metaphors. I become the symbols that I find on the bark of trees or swirling in the desert sands. I feed my clay my ideas and my thoughts, I linger in the ethers of an enigma, losing myself and finding myself ____ sculpting an elastic reality. It takes a certain chaos to create, and the mystery is what is constantly unraveling before us. It spills out into our consciousness in frighteningly beautiful ways. It leads you to your soul. It is pain and pleasure, trouble and desire, disappointment and surprise. It is the amalgam of our sensory reactions that is necessary to open our eyes to what is possible. It is not a coincidence that artists display a tendency to love and to demonstrate passion beyond the ordinary. Art becomes the idea that we are beyond the swarm, beyond the everyday details of life. We want to take the viewer or the reader or the listener on an adventure. Travelling through our creations, we offer wings to the viewer, inviting them to soar beyond the confines of ordinary perception and into the vast expanse of imagination. It takes courage to create, to tell your own personal truth, to be honest with yourself. It is the purity of truth that takes us into the deepest parts of ourselves. Truth has a life of its own. In this pursuit of truth, we are led to the deepest recesses of our being, where the purity of authenticity ignites a transformative journey. The senses of your soul will take you to new heights if you allow your preconceptions to dissipate. Tell the truth, shame the devil and never look back. As artists, we are perpetual seekers of the ineffable, forever entwined with the allure of mystery, passion, and magic. We are drawn to the interplay of light and shadow, the juxtaposition of feathers and stones, the boundless expanse of sky meeting earth. In the words of Vincent van Gogh, "I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?" Let us continue to nourish our creative spirits with the sustenance of mystery, passion, truth, and boundless imagination. And if you are not finding what you are looking for, maybe put your wings on backwards and see where they take you ____ they might just take you somewhere new. R.I.P. Micha von Doring © Gesso Cocteau
MOONDANCE
Henry Moore said “To be an artist is to believe in life.” When I began sketching Moondance there were two quotes I wrote on my paper, one was the above by Moore and the other was by J.M. Barrie, which reads: “The reason birds can fly and we can't is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.” If you know my poetry or have had conversations with me, you know I am obsessed with winged creatures. The idea of wings conjures up the ‘enchanted’ world, the 'dreamland’ where imagination blends with reality. This is the world I have come to love since I was a child, blending real world with magic. As humans we long to defy gravity. We carry in our hearts an ancient longing to have wings, to be able to soar like the birds we watch in an open sky, the near perfect metaphor for freedom. The part about faith in the quote by J.M Barrie is profound and meaningful. Whenever I begin to sketch for a sculpture, I am mostly trying to find my faith and my conviction. I am trying to find wings to take me into another world and discover a three-dimensional form of my vision. The idea of balancing emotions and love with another human can be a bit of a see saw. The alternating up-and-down or backward-and-forward movement and always trying keep the relationship equitable is impossible without wings. The wings of humans may be invisible to the naked eye but if we look intuitively, we can catch a glimpse of feathers and pinion. Humans are equipped with wings of equilibrium. This counterbalance device is always correcting the paradoxical experiences of love’s gravity and levity. Moondance is a visual definition of the shared human experience of being in love, while it liberates us from earthly constraints it also anchors us to the profound aspects of our being. This is ‘Moondance’, forged from fire _ a visual poem. MOONDANCE / TABLE TOP BRONZE 32"x13'x 24"/ EDITION of 18 For Carl ___ because your love inspires me to dream. art © Gesso Cocteau Because the idea of 'MOONDANCE' came to me in a dream of the Moon and Bella _
Rose Thorn
You said: “It's all deeper water. even the prevalent shallows.” Your words landed soft upon my skin and slit their way into my heart, even my clenched fist let go and for a moment I dreamt I was floating upon the intangible. I have had so many lives always living on the edge between chance and a meticulous scenario. But mostly I find myself within the cavern of this sensual life, asking myself. what am I without this? You are living in my head right now, and the bird nestled right outside my window sings a song I cannot decode. You told me a secret and I have planted it deep into my garden between the roses and the thorns. © Gesso Cocteau
Secrets Between Our Shadows and Our Souls
Secrets Between Our Shadows and Our Souls Surrounded by myself and the tall summer’s grass I lie still ____ and alone listening to the songs of the earth. I am crawling through the underbrush of what use to be us ____ and even though you are gone the flowers remain. I wanted more, I always want more my appetite exceeds my frame and I spill out into the visible world. You knew I was insatiable you tried to temper me you were honest and kind and as your friend said ‘you were always ‘present’ ____ but I was afraid, and when you asked me what I believed in I turned away. ( I believe ‘we have played along side millions of lovers’) Perhaps we were, in some past life mythological lovers ____ I think sometimes we ask too much of one another. ____ and so what if love dies over and over again. (age after age the words of the poet fall from the past into the future, an eternal song of desire fueled by the ‘perfect moment’. For now _____ my heart sings to the poppies as they cast their shadows upon my spine ____ I call out to you____ you see me in this dream: I ask you to return my heart to my body so that I might feel again. (God it is so humbling to be alive and sometimes I am so afraid my heart will break into a thousand pieces.) In this fragmented dream you whisper to me ____ through the fields and the forest kissing my rough hands: ____the hands made strong by bronze, by pencil and by ink. (My body stretches out to reach you extended into this landscape ____ forever.) Is all of this life a magical illusion? When my eyes are closed I feel you making love to me but then ____ the memories shift and I am moving slowly in my garden envisioning human suffering trying to remember your touch. Maybe it is the poetry that saves me, ____ or perhaps the sun, this field, the forest or the moon. For now I allow myself to feel the beauty of pain ____ to speak truth and to taste the flowers that seep into my veins. I still love you you made me feel alive ____ and the lord of darkness reminded me that nothing can hurt me if I let go of everything that gives me pleasure. You gave me breath honesty and love but I am not certain of spellbound hearts and everything is so temporary ____ We are all in movement on our way to the unknown. (Love is the ‘why’ of life.) I lost you, now I love another ____ the one who gives fire to my soul, but still I crawl through the fields at night beneath the goddess of love and silently I crave you. These are the secrets between our shadows and our souls. © Gesso Cocteau