Pratik La Special : Caley O’Dwyer’s Art: Life as Revision

 

Caley O’Dwyer’s Art: Life as Revision

 

In my paintings, I’m interested in architectural forms both for their own sake and as analogues for, or signs of, interior experience. With lines and more fluid shapes, I explore the idea that the self is relational and plural along with the sense that persons are fluid and mercurial. I like the idea that people are both individual and multiple, that differences in context bring forth variations of self and that these changes happen across time. Gouache (on paper) and oil paint (on canvas) are favorable mediums for depicting change because they can be worked over and over again, heaps of solid opacity blocking out what was underneath it, or more transparent washes with less pigment inviting glimpses into the under layers. The cutting out and collaging of painted paper to reposition figures or painting over areas of oil painting speaks to my sense of life as revision, this process that happens in time and which never ends, but which still images can seem to “fix.” These paintings struggle against this sense of fixity, such that arguably beautiful passages are sometimes sacrificed in favor of painting over them or scratching them out. If painting is a kind of conversation wherein physical gestures merge ideas with materials, I’m increasingly interested in keeping the conversation going, with how to render “ongoing-ness” in a way that isn’t just a mess. But the process involves risking messiness because the paintings typically only feel “right” or finished when they’ve been worked up to an extent that seems almost irretrievable. When they work, some leap of faith into further conversation (more painting, more cutting, more pasting, more doing) eventually yields a new order I couldn’t have planned or known.

 

The Wanderers (2008)

from RUN (2015)

                                                                  A Day Without Violence (cropped)

Conversion (2016)

Caley O’Dwyer is a visual artist, poet, and teacher living in Los Angeles. His painting practice is driven by postmodern psychology, humor, wonder and musicality, emphasizing uncertainty, process painting and surprise. Alongside his painting practice at the Brewery Arts Complex in downtown Los Angeles, Caley teaches creative writing and psychology at Antioch University and was previously an Associate Professor in University of Southern California’s Writing Program. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Washington Square and other venues, including the Tate Modern Museum in London. He is a winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and a recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer grant for poetry. His first book, Full Nova, was published by Orchises Press, and his in-progress collection, Light, Earth and Blue, features poems written in response to the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. 

 

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PRATIK LA ISSUE SPECIAL: American Poet Genevieve Kaplan's poem

Genevieve Kaplan

You’ve shown interest in weather forecasting

 

And the tide, learning the tables and knowing the shore.

 

And there was at times, could be, interest in wildfires: for spotting

and recording and reporting, in sitting in towers and watching

for wisps of smoke from dry trees, tips of voices and elements

that rise.

 

It’s true the rocks might not know anymore, be unable to tell one

from another, a chirp from a lizard from a shell from a friend.

 

As for me, I was hoping not to have a body at all. To instead

be left to water and fire and the small bent or broken legs of ants.

And that sort of quiet feeling of walking legless along the shoreline

at dusk.

 

 

Genevieve Kaplan is the author of (aviary) (Veliz Books, 2020) and In the ice house (Red Hen, 2011), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s poetry publication prize. Her recent work can be found in Poetry, Spillway, The Laurel Review, and Thrush. She lives in southern California where she edits the Toad  Press International chapbook series, publishing  contemporary translations of poetry and prose.

 

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Pratik LA issue highlight: Judith Pacht's poem, "Circle"

Judith Pacht

Circle

Julia is losing clumps of hair.  She wears a wig out in the world, but at home or on long walks the wig stays on her vanity, her gray brown strands scatter. In the woods nearby, branches plunge into cool deep shade.  Mulch thickens from years of leaves & rain. She settles into a drift of loss to contemplate chemotherapy. The air sings: a chorus of cicadas, birdsong, the winged zzz of diving insects.  One tree limb rubs against another. A warm breeze lifts damselflies, birds, oak leaves on shafts of light – cool downdrafts drop them lower than shadow. Nothing is here, everything is here: spider silk & moss for nests, leaves for hatching swallowtail butterflies, the occasional cloud that darkens.  Two birds circle. Alight, take off. She watches them disappear into a thicket – thin strands in their bills will line their nest, shape their home.

 

A three-time Pushcart nominee, Judith Pacht was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society’s Edgar Bowers competition. Her work has appeared in journals that include Ploughshares, Runes, Nimrod and Phoebe, and her poems have been translated into Russian where they were published in Foreign Literature (Moscow, Russia). Her work appears in numerous anthologies.

 

 

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PRATIK LA SPECIAL : AMBIKA TALWAR POEM

 

AMBIKA TALWAR

Wiry Young Man in Back-to-front Baseball Cap Waiting to Check in at Delta-Air France, Dimpled…

 

that he likes pictures

that he knows a man, so what he did, he drew a guy an old man

        1/2 white 1/2 black

that we need to do something crazy – craazzee

that we must paint, be amazing and creative

that he’s going to Paris to see his brother who has a new baby girl

that he is godfather to this baby girl – mom is French

that he’d like people to live in peace to live in peace

that that’s basically it – that’s it

 

that he’s Lebanese

that he’s lived in war all the time

that wherever he goes the war comes back to him (he laughs)

that peace is kind of boring but nice

 

that … is he going to be in a poem?

 

that he has no big dreams

that he is a principled person

that he has a friend in Bombay –  Mumbai?

that his name is Dravid ... (then wonders if I write from left to right)

that he travels a lot ... wants to know if I have been to Nepal

that he works hard – just works hard

that no he has not thought of it – has no big dreams

that he play soccer – that’s it...! That’s it!

that he never lie – likes pure – still likes that...

that he wants something pure and original – not fake!

that Lebanon is a nice country has four seasons is very small

that now in April it’s snowing and go to the beach the same time

       1/2 hour away

that raice is Phoenician – Raice! Raice!

that Lebanon distributed the letter – alphabet – to the world actually

that one-of-a-kind cedar only found in Lebanon

that it is very old…old, 3,000 years

that actually there’s a temple made in Palestine

that it’s made from this cedar – is mentioned in the Bible

that people of Lebanon they speak 3 languages – Arabic, French, English

 

that he’s going to Paris and the line is slow

 

that people in Lebanon – they don’t respect the law

that that’s bad – very bad

that it means peace – that Lebanon means peace

that it comes from the white skin of the orange – skin inside skin

 

that he never knew its meaning was peace ... and ... and freedom

        isn’t that ridiculous?

 

Ambika Talwar is an India-born poet-artist, educator, wellness consultant whose ecstatic poetry is a “bridge to other worlds.” She authored 4 Stars & 25 Roses (poems for her father) and My Greece: Mirrors & Metamorphoses, a poetic-spiritual travelogue. 

 

 

 

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