The Visitation, Monotype of the Day #200

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Feels good to break into the 200s 😊
Sometimes it takes sheer force of will. Spent the day on forced bed rest ruminating on more Rilke. "You must change your life" has always been an animating principle for me. My father always modeled this concept when I was growing up. When I first discovered this poem as a teen I took its call to change to heart.

Archaic Torso of Apollo
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875 - 1926

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

the artist has company, Monotype of the Day #199

I'm thinking of one of my favorite poems tonight although I don't see the direct relationship to this image. It's from the Sonnets to Orpheus by Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell
A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings?
Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads there is no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,
not wooing any grace that can be achieved;
song is reality. Simple, for a god.
But when can we be real? When does he pour

the earth, the stars, into us? Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
was forced wide open by your own voice – learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

The Vessel, Monotype of the Day #185

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I was bothered all day by yesterday's print. The hand going up from the figure without any grounding. I often have the experience that when I change the energy deliberately in a piece it shifts something in my life. So I went back to yesterday's concept and made a connection to the ground with the lake of orange. I feel much better. 😊