Final Hours of the Final Day of My Favorite Month

What "Darkness" Looks Like:

What "Silence" Sounds Like:

Tell-tale Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was time,

and we took our time to find it; whereupon

it was defined by its absence,
decreasing supply -

an absolute need for additional time.

By then we'd made time's value high,

and the value of using it too.

LaoTsu said: To live long, be of no use -

My time contracts; its uses for me
expand. I'll see no end, until

The.

Ravenna Taylor, Heat Waves #11, 2012, watercolor, gouache, color pencil, 8 x 10 inches

Either Way

sometimes I wish to confess

sometimes I might succumb

sometimes I am too small

I swim in my self-made lake of aspirations

short of respiration, buoyed by inspirations

all of it, everything, lapping

at an edge I might not reach

I lack

I swim

without my glasses 

I'm nearsighted

Ravenna Taylor, "Either Way," 2012, oil on linen over wood, 5 x 7 inches

Stepping Stones

Last week I completed a drawing, and it happened to be the last page in a sketchbook I'd been keeping since 1996. I keep multiple books, of course, so that's how one can last so long. I thought it might be interesting to post the entire sequence of 24 drawings; these are not great photos, but just an animation, of sorts, of my visual development. If one were to go to my website [here], whether the "paintings" section or the "work on paper," it would be readily seen how many of these correspond to works in oil or collage -- although in some cases, drawings are made after the fact, as a way of moving on from that image into another.