Lily S. May–Life with Art
This is the work I showed a detail of in my last post. It has gone through extreme changes and finally developed into this image that I am now going to stop working on and let be. In some ways it's an awkward piece and I felt it was trying to tell me something, so… Continue reading Raw
The heat wave has now broken, but we had hot and extremely hot weather in Toronto over the past while. During that time, I took to walking in the streets in the evening to listen to the cicadas and crickets. I discovered, to my surprise, that I was present to listening to the sounds of… Continue reading Threshold
I've begun making a series of postcards. Here are the first two I've designed, back from the printer. These are combinations of two poems I've written superimposed on two of my linocuts. You can also see the postcards in my etsy shop. I decided to give the series a name and hit upon naming them in… Continue reading Cedar Postcards
The great great poet and song writer Leonard Cohen died yesterday. I was very fortunate to see and hear him perform a few years ago in Toronto when he filled a stadium with fans of all ages. He and the musicians with him gave the most generous long gracious show. This is in remembrance of… Continue reading Leonard Cohen
I've completed an accordion booklet with my writing about Milne's Black Waterfall painting. You can see the initial idea in Poem for an Old Woodcut. There's other related posts following that one. I decided to print my writing on thin Japanese paper and adhere it to the booklet. Here's some photos of it from different angles. I like seeing different parts… Continue reading Black Waterfall Poem Booklet
As I continue turning some of my early prints into booklets, I'm playing around with words I might include with the prints. This last print I've been working with (the one that's also in my previous post) has a lot of black ink in it. And that got me thinking about some writing I did a… Continue reading A Poem for An Old Woodcut
A few years ago, I entered several notebooks and photographs in The Sketchbook Project. In 2012, I sent away for another moleskine book. I had previously written a poem that I thought would paradoxically work with the topic "Fill me with Stories." I made a book using very simple line drawings and printing. I can't recall why… Continue reading The Emptiness We Require
Last week while looking through the sketchbook in which I found the artwork for my previous post, I came upon a drawing I had forgotten. A few years ago I used the drawing as a starting point for an oil painting. The painting was, in its style, unlike other work I had done. In the painting,… Continue reading The Road
We are walking in a garden we are blind to though it bears our names. And the suffering, the suffering is great, but the unveiling of the heart is greater. © 2015 Lily S. May
The great poet, Mahmoud Darwish, was born on March 13 in Palestine. Different sources have dated his birth to both 1941 and '42. He died in August 2008. At any rate, today I am celebrating his birth. His words have added more beauty to my life than I can adequately describe. From the book The Butterfly's… Continue reading March 13: Mahmoud Darwish
Arts of May 