Artist Journal
The Beautiful Bats
The "Frosty" Traveler of Indian Wells: A Seasonal Mystery Solved For three years now, I’ve watched these elegant, large-winged shadows glide quietly through our Coachella Valley skies each spring. They arrive like clockwork in April, as if summoned by something ancient and precise, and by mid-May they are gone again, vanishing as mysteriously as they came. At last, I know who they are. They are the Hoary Bat (Lasiurus cinereus). A Shimmering Presence These are not the small, fluttering bats most people imagine. The Hoary Bat is something altogether different, one of North America’s largest, with a wingspan that can reach up to sixteen inches. When the light catches them just right, they seem almost dusted in frost. Their fur carries a deep mahogany tone softened by grey, each hair tipped in white, giving them that luminous, “hoary” glow. And if you look closely, there are small white splashes at the wrists of their wings, like quiet signatures written in light. The Long-Distance Commuter What amazes me most is their journey. These are not creatures that stay close to home. They travel, truly travel. Winters are spent in the warmth of Mexico, and summers stretch as far north as Canada. They do not gather in colonies or caves; instead, they live solitary lives, resting in trees, moving with a kind of quiet independence I find deeply beautiful. When they pass through Indian Wells, it feels less like an accident and more like a chosen pause along an ancient route. A Five-Star Garden Menu Our neighborhood becomes, for a brief moment, their sanctuary, a kind of luxury rest stop in the desert. They tuck themselves into our palm trees during the day, wrapping their wings around their bodies like soft, living cloaks. And at dusk, they rise. They are hunters of a very particular kind, drawn to the large moths of the Coachella Valley. Palm Flower Moths and the White-lined Sphinx, those fast, hummingbird-like creatures, become their nourishment. It’s fascinating to watch; they catch their prey mid-flight with precision, consuming only what they need, and letting the delicate wings fall gently to the ground like fragments of paper drifting down. There is something almost poetic in that restraint. I feel incredibly lucky that these remarkable travelers choose our garden, our palms, our small corner of the desert, as part of their long journey each year. For a few weeks, we share space with them, quietly, respectfully, before they lift again into the night and continue on their way. And somehow, each time they leave, they take a little bit of wonder with them, leaving the rest behind for us to hold onto until they return again. Image and Poem © Gesso Cocteau
She Does Not Turn Around
Before She Turns She does not turn, not yet as if the body knows to look is to surrender. And love if that is what this is refuses the dignity of a name. It does not arrive. It infiltrates. Like music through a wall too thin to protect you, it enters the spine first, not as touch, but as recognition. You thought it would be light. You thought it would openlike mercy,forgiving,something you believedyou could survive. But no. It is closer to smoke, something already burning without permission. A hunger that knows exactly… But a hunger that knows where to place itself to undo you. The air alters. Still no touch. Only that unbearable proximity, so precise it begins to map you from the outside in, a line drawn without mercy, without contact, without asking. You could turn. You don’t. Because restraint is the last illusion of control. And something in you older than thought is already leaning toward it. You understand now: love is not gentle. It is ostinato. What it finds, it enters. What it enters, it changes. What it changes does not return. And still she does not turn. Because she knows the moment she does it will not be love that meets her, but something more ruthless, more intimate something that has been waiting not for her body, but for her consent to disappear into it. Image and Poetry © Gesso Cocteau #gessococteau
The Intelligence of Silence
The Intelligence in Silence "I stopped performing for the light and started eating the dark. It turns out, hunger isn't a weakness—it’s an initiation." I did not fall.I wanted to know.The surface world was thin polite light, curated smiles,rooms arranged for approval.I could feel something beneath itlike a pulse under marble.So I went down.Not dragged.Not tricked.Drawn.The wheat parted around my bodyas if I were returning to somethingolder than memory.Gold against my cheek.Dry stalks whisperingthis is where the roots speak.The pages pinned behind me,fragments of script, abandoned drafts,ink pressed into paper like breath into skin ,were not relics.They were versions of methat stopped halfway.I lay among themand let the ravens come.They did not circle.They landed.Black weight on my shoulder,sharp intelligence against my throat.One pressed its beakto the soft place below my collarboneand asked without sound:How far will you go?I answered by eating.The fruit was not sweetness.It was density.It was heat.It was the sudden awarenessthat hunger is not weakness,it is the mind entering the body.The red on my mouthwas knowledge passing through flesh.I wanted to know what desire iswhen it is not edited for someone else.When it is not shaped for applause.When it is not restrained into virtue.In the underworldnothing flatters you.Nothing performs for you.There, shadow does not accuse.It reveals.I met my animus there,not as a man,but as iron in my spine,as the unflinching voice that said:Take up your own depth.Do not borrow power.Generate it.I lay in sacred alonenessuntil solitude stopped feeling like exileand began to feel like initiation.The ravens did not leave.They became language.The wheat did not wither.It rooted in my body.I will carry the underworld in my mouthlike a secret lover,and nothing that touches mewill remain untouched. Poetry and Image © Gesso Cocteau
Where the Body Thinks and the Soul Takes Form
I have never experienced sculpture and poetry as separate disciplines.They are two expressions of the same act of attention. My sculptures begin as observations of the human condition, not as it is performed, but as it is lived. The quiet lean of one body toward another. The tension between longing and restraint. The moment where love steadies us or undoes us. I am less interested in spectacle than in recognition: the instant when someone sees themselves inside a form and feels understood without explanation. Sculpture, for me, is a language of the body.Poetry is the same language, spoken inward. When I sculpt, I am listening with my hands. Bronze carries memory. It holds weight, resistance, gravity, just as we do. The human figure becomes a site of inquiry: how we endure, how we reach, how we protect ourselves, how we surrender. The surface matters, but what lives beneath the surface matters more. What is unspoken. What is held. My poetry often arrives after the sculpture, as if the work has loosened something that needs words. Other times, the poem comes first, a line, an image, a truth that insists on being felt before it can be seen. In those moments, the sculpture follows the poem like a body following breath. Each informs the other. Each sharpens the question. There is a conversation constantly unfolding between these two forms.The sculpture teaches the poem about silence.The poem teaches the sculpture about vulnerability. I think of my work, whether cast in bronze or written in lines, as acts of witnessing. To love is to witness. To create is to witness. To stand still long enough for the moment to speak. I am drawn to themes of devotion, resilience, sensuality, and the unguarded spaces between people. The human condition is not abstract to me, it is intimate. It lives in posture, in proximity, in the way two figures can hold an entire history without narrative. My figures are often grounded, rooted to the earth, because love is not an idea, it is something we carry in our bodies. Over time, I have come to understand that my sculptures are poems that refuse to speak, and my poems are sculptures that refuse to stand still. They exist in a shared field of meaning, each one asking the same essential questions: How do we live inside love?How do we survive longing?What does it mean to remain open in a world that asks us to close? The image accompanying this piece captures me as I am most often found, observing, listening, inhabiting the space between thought and form. It is there, in that in-between, where my work lives. Art, for me, is not about answers.It is about staying with the questionand allowing it to take shape. Gesso CocteauSculptor & Poet
Before the Bronze: The Shape of Forever
In the language of clay, love is never still,it keeps forming us, endlessly, into Forever. Forever (for the Viking) In the beginning, there was only clay and breath,the quiet surrender between two forms learning how to be one.Every curve, every reach, remembers touch,not the touch that ends, but the kind that begins againeach time one heart leans toward another. I call this Forever because it carries the weight of love that has no edge,no border between body and spirit, giver and receiver.It is the moment before bronze,when the pulse of creation is still visible,alive beneath the fingertips that shaped it. Here, they stand,not as man and woman, not even as figures,but as the echo of devotion itself.A reminder that love is never still;it keeps forming us, over and over,until we recognize ourselvesin the arms of another. — Gesso Cocteau This is Forever in the foundry completed in clay and before the mold is made. I will post the piece when it is completed in Bronze.
True Love
True Love “Make me immortal with a kiss.” — Christopher Marlowe There are moments as an artist when creation feels less like invention and more like revelation, as if the piece already exists in another realm and you are simply the vessel pulling it through.True Love came to me in such a way. Two forms entwined, not just in body, but in essence, suspended, weightless, eternal.I thought of the Marlowe line: “Make me immortal with a kiss.”And I understood.Some kisses are not between lipsthey are between lifetimes.I wrote this poem as an invocation of that fire. True Love (for Carl) Make me immortal,not with words,but with the wayyour hands erasethe boundary of my skin.We are already myth,two bodies forgedin the same crucible of need,the same molten breaththat shaped the stars.You lift me into youas if gravity were only a rumortold by thosewho have never touched eternity.Kiss me,and let deathfind us fused,still burning. Poetry and Image© Gesso Cocteau
The Scent of Jasmine and Ash
The Scent of Jasmine and Ash (a love remembered across lifetimes at Angkor Wat) I was not born, I was remembered. Pulled from fury. My face shaped in the breath before time, where someone once spoke my name and even the statues turned. He did not remember me, standing beneath the South Gate where gods and demons still drag time like rope through the mouth of the world. But I remembered him. I walked barefoot through the ruins of what were. The dust rose like incense around my ankles, as if the earth was trying to hold me still. He had loved me here once, called me light, called me danger, then vanished like a name washed from stone. I entered the chambers where silence lives. The walls did not speak, but they opened. A thousand faces carved in stone looked away as I stepped into the memory. There was something in his gaze, like a note from a forgotten song still echoing in the body. He didn’t know why his hands reached for mine but I did. I have carried him through centuries, his many names his many mouths all of them living in the hollow beneath my ribs. I forgave him not as mercy but as fire: a temple lit by what endures. When he turned and asked if he knew me, I said only: ‘I remember you’. I did not stay, I never do. My raven told me, “The stones have already taken you in, carving your name where no one can ever erase it.” And now, the tiger watches from the shadows as the wind moves like breath against the skin of our past. Poetry and Image© Gesso Cocteau
Flowers That Open in Moonlight
Flowers That Open in Moonlight ‘Moving between two worlds is difficult’ The crow came first. Not as a warning, but as a witness.It sat in the crook of the ash tree,older than memory, limbs broken open from storms I don’t recall.Its beak glinted like the edge of a blade a memory of forgotten steel.The moon was so bright it hurt. I turned my face but it followed. Even the leaves could not hide me.That was when I saw him, walking toward me through the dark, shadows followed him but did not let him go. He had the posture of someone who had loved me once,or meant to. His face stayed hidden. What I saw was how the earth accepted him, each step without resistance. I leave bruises where I walk. Some flowers only bloom in the moonlight. I have learned their names by listening, not asking. I did not reach for him. I have done that before. The crow lifts its wings. The tree creaks open. The moon left a mark on the air between us, and it never faded. ©Gesso Cocteau art and poetry For the flowers that bloom only in the moonlight
The Ache That Lingers: Why We Are Drawn to Unrequited Love
There is a kind of love that never fully arrives, and never quite leaves. A love that doesn’t ask to be held — only felt. These are the stories we return to, the ones that leave us hollowed and haunted, changed and awakened. The stories of unrequited love. I’ve come to believe that what draws us to these stories is not despair, but reverence. To love someone who cannot stay, who cannot match your depth, yet still ignites your soul — that is not a failure. That is holy. That is the echo of something ancient, written into the bone memory of being human. Unrequited love is the place where longing becomes devotion. It lives in that liminal space between what is and what could have been. It hums in the silence between words, in the heat of a touch that never happens. It is not about possession — it is about presence. About being cracked open and letting light spill in. As Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote,“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation.” And maybe that’s why we return again to the stories of love unreturned — because they prepare us for the deeper work. They sharpen us. They remind us that love, even when not fully received, still transforms us. That even unreturned love is not wasted. “The wind keeps what the heart cannot say — breathing passion into the grasses, memory into the trees.” This line came to me like a whisper through the veil, and the poem that follows — A Whispered Secret — is not just about one man, or one love. It is about the way love marks us. The way it asks us to stay open. And how, even when it leaves, it teaches us something about freedom, resurrection, and the sacred rebellion of loving without needing to be understood. Unrequited love is not a wound.It is a poem we carry inside us —unfinished, but eternal. A Whispered Secret “The wind keeps what the heart cannot say — breathing passion into the grasses, memory into the trees.” I met him in a season of split skin, when the earth cracked and light spilled in. He was a blaze, a living wound of passion, struck hot by every collision that shaped him. I told him stories, of kinbaku ropes and the poems I whispered with my wrists bound in silk ____ of lovers who carved stars into my back and left me to dream through pain. I told him everything. He listened, like someone watching fire too close, not afraid, not brave, just drawn. He held both my ice and my fury in his palms, like riverstones warmed by sun, trying to define the ineffable. I was a constellation to him, a map he wanted to fold into his chest but didn’t know how to read. He wanted to hold me, but I could not be held. He wanted my flame, but not the ashes I rise from. He said he loved me in a strange and beautiful way, the way men love what they do not understand, tender at the edges, containing the ache but not the woman. And I, I submitted ____ not to him, but to love itself, which is to say to pain, to resurrection, to freedom. Because sometimes submission is the most holy rebellion. He couldn’t stay. He was never meant to. But a man who comes to you by fate never asks for forever, only for you to stay open and never ____ forget. © Gesso Cocteau 2025