Keira McArthur

I seek privacy while I taste these new things.  These ideas and thoughts that co-mingle inside my being, each one changing the colour and tone of the one before, sparking new thoughts in marvellous chemical reactivity.  More like alchemy, it feels.  As though I’m levitated, it feels. All of this internal, so I have few […]

I’m in my socks on a quiet street in the old section of town, pulling goutweed out of the garden.  It’s early on an idyllic spring morning, full of bees and growth, flowers and a gentle cool breeze.  A starling, harsh and insistent, comments on my weeding.  I explain that in the ecosystem of my tiny […]

Snow is both light and heavy, slow and fast, visible and not. It’s a season of contrast. I live in a Canadian province that stretches from Windsor/Detroit (on a latitudinal par with Northern California) to Hudson’s Bay – a stretch between 42 and 57N; from carolinian forest to tundra – “Ontario is Canada’s second largest […]

acres of open acres and acres of open grassland like water in the wind but grass sings differently than water, if you listen Grass sings air On the treadmill today I close my eyes and listen to Africa my shoulders stop fighting gravity and every muscle is fluid easy, open, walking steady and forever like […]

I honestly don’t have a clue what I look like from the outside.  Or- I have clues, from friends (hopefully most honest, but still undeniably subject to mood changes & emotional wellbeing), family (often distorted by… family), men who have been drinking in bars (predictable), random encounters with strangers…  and more recently in my Selfie […]

I stood grinning on a hill in the spring wind without the protection of my long winter coat and smelled the turning of the planet towards the sun. This Titanic winter season has run amok of the inevitable.  As did the Titans when banished to the underworld and the unsinkable ship when torn by an […]

Not sure I can do it justice tonight.  There’s a cool change I’m trying to put my finger on…. and a river rock I got in Manhattan in 2009…. I’m not really verbal.  What’s rich for me resides in the resonance and richness of what is visual and tactile and aural – so these blogs […]

I have two feet’s worth of projects to move from here to over there – from the possible to the more possible pile; to the surprisingly good pile, a few to the “well now I know that won’t work ever” pile.  They all have a best before date; some of which I know, others I’ve […]

Although I can’t see it through the opaque winter sky I can feel it:  the moon is full. With the able help of cellists Carol Mulder and Sibylle Ruppert my excellent mom and I performed David Popper’s Requiem for three celli and piano for our Industrial Ancestors yesterday evening.  Folk came out to witness as […]

We were in my studio where almost every inch of wall, floor table and shelf is crammed with stuff in process and use, with tools, & paint & vine charcoal & buttons & books & thread & blank paper & other paper covered with notes or ideas or solo, duet, trio, quartet or orchestral music.  […]

One of my best teachers gave us a good daily practice.  This came out of a discussion about the idea of when one is truly ‘finished’ with something – in this case a painting – but it could be a poem, a novel,  practise or rehearsal of a piece, a song, a cleaning project, a […]