Poems by Matthea Harvey

*Some Poems by Matthea Harvey*

SETTING THE TABLE

To cut through night you'll need your sharpest scissors. Cut around the birch, the bump of the bird nest on its lowest limb. Then with your nail scissors, trim around the baby beaks waiting for worms to fall from the sky. Snip around the lip of the mailbox and the pervert's shoe peeking out from behind the Chevy. Before dawn, rip the silhouette from the sky and drag it inside. Frame the long black stripe and hang it in the dining room. Sleep. When you wake, redo the scene as day in doily. Now you have a lacy fence, a huge cherry blossom of a holly bush, a birch sugared with snow. Frame the white version and hang it opposite the black. Get your dinner and eat it between the two scenes. Your food will taste just right.

YOU HAVE MY EYES

Give them Back.

OUT OF ORDER

Today it's about truth and hope

and there are no ha-ha's

between me and the living.

World, I'm no one

to complain about you.

All poems from Modern Life by Matthea Harvey

Work in Progress

Lately I've been spending most of my creative time working on a collage, mixed media piece. Its going to take a while, but I love throwing myself into a project and slowly finishing each element. Its been particularly slow lately as I've been sick all week. Yuck! Here are some photos of the work in progress.

Every time I draw a picture, I feel like it has an elaborate story hidden within it. Somebody commented to this effect a few posts ago and it got me thinking about ways that I can incorporate text into the picture.

...and a gratuitous cool shoe shot because I walked around our apartment breaking these beauties in all day and just wanted to share them, since I can't wear them outside yet :)

How was your weekend?

Secrets of the Sea

Can you tell? I drew this while watching Ondine:)

Lady in the Clay

Since making my resolution to try out different forms of artistic expression, I've been looking around my community for classes to take. The first one of these that I signed up for was a sculpture workshop at a local museum. It was so wonderful! The class was only four hours long and among the ten students, most of us were beginners. We arranged the work areas around the model, the instructor did a short demonstration of the method we were supposed to employ and then we took a block of clay and some tools and just started to sculpt. Every five minutes or so, we would move to a different area of the room to see the model from that perspective and the instructor walked around and gave suggestions.

The time flew by so quickly, I could hardly believe that it was four hours long. In the end, we all lined up our pieces and talked about our observations. My sculpture was pretty much what she said it would be -- it resembles a woman, but there really wasn't time for too many details. Instead we focused on identifying the planes that we observed and shaving off pieces of the clay that corresponded. It felt so good to get lost in the process and covered in clay; to learn something new.

I liked the class so much that I'm going to take a longer course over the summer.