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"King of Pains" is a collaborative piece created by the artists !Ojo! and ?Free Krypto?, members of the BeForFineArts collective. The graphic illustration depicts a well-known music icon initially rendered in pastel, then customized with Microsoft Paint. The piece narrates a critical observation: While kings get a bad rap today, they come in various forms. Many popular idols have influences that extend further than the reach of authentic royalty and the persuasive power of these media celebrities often leads to social harm much more injurious than that caused by the largely symbolic gestures of contemporary kings and queens. Posters of "King of Pains" are available on BeForFineArts.com

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Where is the moon when we are blind?

How does direction work?

Where is the Sun to the starving?

If I saw you again for a moment,

would I be more or less

afraid of dying?

(Scott Norman Rosenthal)

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This photograph was taken in September 2022, at the end of the opening reception of the ISPS International Conference in Perugia, Italy, held at the National Archaeological Museum of Umbria. As my group was gathering to leave, I was captivated by the golden light and patterns created by the well lights and decorative grasses in the courtyard.

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LIght in Darkness Perugia 2022 Claire Bien - Claire Bien

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Before the Deluge is an oil on canvas painting of a streetscape in Corona del Mar, California, where I lived with my father before being re-committed to the Department of State Hospitals in 2008. The painting depicts suburbia on the verge of transition, before real estate speculation transforms quaint bungalows into stylish, expensive, multi-story houses, a process that could arguably be described as "psychotic" since it destroys traditional, perfectly habitable homes for structures that often are not suited to the community's scale and also beyond the economic reach of all but the financially very well-off.

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“The Mad Enchanter Dances

for Sister Alice”

(for Penelope Dugan, and for Eric Wallace)

“the Past”

Sister, somewhere...land is burning...

the people grow... out of agony...

Somewhere strange, wondrous:

other voices, sunlit cadence...

...folk rejoice.

“the Hope”

Corn of the soil, doorways of childhood.

...Youth!

...What place we might envision...

“the Dancing”

There are fires, there be Autumn, and the land

has spun about...

...About! Again!...

We might walk, shift our way, around fires,

through the land,

...Again! Again!...

Sister we may: leap!... transcend the fires...

...Walk about, though the land...

...About!...Again!...

(Scott Norman, Spring ‘87)

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in the ICOSS meetings, one of members passed away; I saw her two- three times in the meeting but still remembered her dragon fly that was combined the beautiful colors. It was a short time meeting with her but it was the strong impact of her art. The picture is taken for the memory of her; dried orchard stamps , flowers in a glass jar, white lotus origami & warms; these are all made for the death & reborn in Asian culture. pray for her in peace.

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Some of these origami pieces were folded with my child who had a hard time in his school and these process of folding origami made him to open himself to talk with families and to ask his teachers to figure out his struggle together. Pieces of Stacked up was his idea & these pieces were glued onto a canvas sized 9"x12", magazine papers, glue sticks used.

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Some of these origami pieces were folded with my child who had a hard time in his school and these process of folding origami made him to open himself to talk with families and to ask his teachers to figure out his struggle together. Pieces of Stacked up was his idea & these pieces were glued onto a canvas sized 9"x12", magazine papers, glue sticks used.

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Some of these origami pieces were folded with my child who had a hard time in his school and these process of folding origami made him to open himself to talk with families and to ask his teachers to figure out his struggle together. Pieces of Stacked up was his idea & these pieces were glued onto a canvas sized 9"x12", magazine papers, glue sticks used.

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Wear your scars with pride!
For you have lived through battles.
You have survived
Life’s slings and arrows,
And though they may yet pain you –
You live despite it all.
You are one of life’s survivors!
And though comrades may fall –
Stay strong despite soul’s anguish,
Wear your scars with pride!
And remember this, survivors!
Be proud you have survived!

Tony Demoncy 06/08/2022

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Look at me,
Look at you.
You are Human.
I am too.
We may be different,
We may have different needs.
I deserve as much respect as you
Though we move or think at different speeds
Though I am disabled,
Though you are not,
I am just as Human
You may have forgot
About how to treat me
As equal, deserving
Of rights and respect
Of love and of caring,
I am not less,
You are not more -
We are both human
With gifts and flaws
I am just another person
I have needs and rights and dreams
I am truly fully human
With all that is and all that means.
So, treat me not with less respect
Treat me not with hate or contempt
I deserve as much from life as you
We may be different but I am human too.
Tony Demoncy 11/09/2020

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I am human, I am animal, mammal.
I carry the blood of the seas in my veins.
I was a fish, a worm, a bacteria floating in a soup of primordial nutrients.
I am a thought, an emotion, a rising and falling breath. I am hope and despair.
I am love and distaste, joy and sadness. I am a whisper, a shout, a cry of passion.
I am laughter, I am tears, I am the dust of stars fallen into accretion.
I am the earth, the sky, the stars. I am wisps of hydrogen yearning to be born as new stars.
I am poetry, I am art, I am song, I am science.
I am love, I am hope.
I am me.

01/08/2020 Tony Demoncy

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I am Poet – Artist – Bard
Transformed in the moment of creation
Transfixed by spears of words
Slung forth into the realm of verse
Verse which flows, eddies – riverine and clear –
Seeks sleepy hollows to pool in –
Strokes its fingers of flood
Round islands in the stream
Which has become myself
I am the stream, the verse, the flood, the waters
I am the river, flowing and rushing
Down rapids and falls – yearning, yearning,
Creeping turgid through elbows and bends
Trapped and lost in oxbows
Rough with the pain of myself
Swollen with suffering
As I spread a myriad fingers
Through wetlands filled with birds
Taking flight in song and story
As I stretch and spread
Through the veinous delta
At last, I reach the ending
Of my verse, my song, my story.
I lose myself and my pain in the sea.
Tony Demoncy 23/09/2022

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If I could I would but sometimes I can't,
So I find myself on the level of plants
As I sit or I stand with my leaves unfurled,
Puzzled and quiet and inward curled,
With no buds to my branches
And thorns wrong way round
With the spikes in my brain
And scant peace to be found.
As the thorns drip their moisture,
I gaze at the drops
As they sparkle on grass-stems
Where the grasshopper hops,
Through the dew and the sparkle,
Through thought and through life
And where the sun shimmers
I find peace and not strife.

 Tony Demoncy 2015

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Abstract drawings (fineliner on paper, scanned and digitally colour changed)

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Abstract drawings (fineliner on paper, scanned and digitally colour changed)

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Abstract drawings (fineliner on paper, scanned and digitally colour changed)

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Abstract drawings (fineliner on paper, scanned and digitally colour changed)

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‚Cousins‘ is one of several paintings in which I copy pictures from my personal family photo album. For me, the original photos that I select, represent a high level of ambiguity and contradiction in my biography. During the process of painting and copying the snapshots, I can keep a balance between factual documentation, my family’s verbal story about me and my own physical and emotional resonance. In this picture I decided to cover the persons beside me (my cousins, who title this painting), not in order to put them away, but to make the child visible, who’s never sure if she belongs to a family, because she has hard to feel safety im being connected.
To some degree this process makes me feel „whole“, like (re-) constructing my existence, an existence that feels like my true self, like an identity that’s in resonance with myself.

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Recovery from broken left elbow slowly allows me to fold complicated models. I managed to fold though couldn’t make the model flap

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This is a video of successfully my friend flapping, which made me so happy ❣️Thanks Ritsuko❣️🙏

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An origami model requested by the surviving daughter at the time of an acquaintance's passing

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Abstract drawings (fineliner on paper, scanned and digitally colour changed)

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By Dorothy Scotten

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This work has been created over a three year period where I’ve been broken apart and come back together. The birds represent a freer and more joyful me.

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This work has been created over a three year period where I’ve been broken apart and come back together. The birds represent a freer and more joyful me.

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This work has been created over a three year period where I’ve been broken apart and come back together. The birds represent a freer and more joyful me.

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This work has been created over a three year period where I’ve been broken apart and come back together. The birds represent a freer and more joyful me.

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This work has been created over a three year period where I’ve been broken apart and come back together. The birds represent a freer and more joyful me.

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Reflections on Being in the Present Moment

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Reflections on Being in the Present Moment

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A Saguaro Stands Enroute to Reclamation’s Orme

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A Saguaro Stands Enroute to Reclamation’s Orme

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I have lived a life

Witnessed lean years and fat

And bear my scars I think

With dignity,

And perhaps a touch of grace,

Proud to be rooted and growing.

I have thrilled to the rain

As it caressed my brow

And accepted the pain

Of hawks’ talons clasping my flesh

Comforted by the knowledge

That I would endure

I have watched my elders live

—and die—

Borne my own fruit

And prayed that seeds survive

I thought that was what living was.

But now technology brings

A blueprint for the future

The idealogues’ dreams of growth

And water . . . gentle, life-giving, enduring

Threatens to caress me to oblivion.

Before you came

With your plans for the future

And your machinery of destruction

The cycle was complete;

We were whole

And knew, for all its uncertainty,

That life was good.

But now too many are gone

And we who remain tremble

Lest you in your zeal should determine

That we too must go.

©Claire Bien, 1976 and December 20, 2016

Inspired by a tramp through the Arizona desert in an effort to Stop Orme Dam. The effort was successful.

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It was all so overwhelming.

Not the speaking,

Which has come to seem as natural

As rising in the morning,

And preparing to greet the day

With whatever action-inaction,

Joy or sadness,

The day demands.

No, it was the listening,

To the music of many voices—

Foreign and familiar,

Cadences rising, soaring,

To reach, to touch our hearts

And hold them,

As passions long held,

And ideas rarely considered

Found voice and audience.

And after,

The anticipation

Of recognition or denial,

Of warm embrace or turning away.

And the photographs . . .

Eagerly sought to capture the moment

When we thought we understood each other,

And to help us remember that we were there,

And that we thought we were known and accepted

For who we are,

And for what we have become.

And inevitably wondering

How being together would change us—

Not only who we are,

But also our becoming—

And whether the next time we meet

The beaming faces in the photographs

Still will reflect our new understanding,

And the people we will have become.

©Claire Bien, May 2016

I wrote this poem while at a recovery conference in Brazil in 2016.

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Standing on the steps of the Montgomery State Capitol, The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King forever immortalized the words of Unitarian minister Theodore Parker[1] when he said,

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Prompting me years later, as I looked at the heavens

And considered the star-studded universe

High and vast above us,

To imagine that arc as the course

Of an arrow speeding toward its mark,

Or a tensile filament that spans the distance

From here to there,

Rising beyond where the mind can see

And then drawn

Inexorably down,

Or perhaps aside,

By the gravity of the stars.

I wonder to what degree the arc

Is moved by the sighs of the weary,

Weighted by the cries of the oppressed, or

Swayed by the deeds of the just and unjust.

And what of the pull of privilege and self-interest?

What possible force, I wonder,

Could move the moral universe

Definitively back

Toward justice?

From what is justice born

If not in spanning the distance between self and other:

Finding in sympathy, reason, and tolerance,

The means to build a better world.

©Claire Bien,  January 19, 2015 and December 10, 2019

[1] I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

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Having foregone the picture

Of the pair of swans

Swimming in tranquil waters

On the far side of the lake,

I turned reluctantly toward home.

But as I rose with the ridge,

Was drawn back

By the puzzling, near-mechanical

Yet organic, natural, and rhythmical sound

That came from the woods, or lake beyond.

A woodpecker? Too soft.

A motor? Not on this lake.

Following the sound, I made my way

Past rhododendron and pine to the fence

That protects curious people

From falling down the slope

And saw three swans

Beating their wings against the water,

Against gravity,

Against the gliding serene lives they had hitherto known.

Later I wondered whether these were the selfsame cygnets

I’d seen a month before,

Their sweet brown feathers almost fully transformed

To grown-up white,

And whether their labored fight-flight across the water

Toward the parents on the other side,

Was but one of a series of valiant attempts

To spread their wings and fly.

© Claire Bien

November 2020

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Her friends told me she was gifted as a poet,

But I couldn’t read her calligraphy;

We grew up half a world apart.

At fourteen, she went to the countryside;

Still, she read the classics:

A Dream of Red Mansions,

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Chinese,

But of the west she was ignorant.

Sometimes I thought she hated me

Because I am American.

Once, when she was 20, they found her in the river.

After they pulled her out, she said,

“I was walking. The bank was steep.”

Her friends told me her poems were very sad.

The boyfriend she left in China played the violin;

He worked in a factory.

My uncle and aunt wanted her to marry a doctor.

In 1982 she came to America;

Her ambition:  to study and work

When she was a nurse, the others would follow.

My cousin put an ad in a Chinese newspaper

She got letters from seventeen men.

One of them came to her funeral

He brought his girlfriend.

Later, when we were drinking tea, he asked,

“May I keep the picture your cousin sent me?”

The police found the last letter to her parents;

Her roommate translated it.

My cousin said that she was tired,

And that she was a bad daughter.

“Tell my sister and brothers that I love them.

Do not think that I am dead,

But that in this dream I am in America,

And can never return.”

© Claire Bien, 1985

This poem was written three years after my first cousin took her own life, and two years after I began hearing voices. The mental health professionals thought my cousin’s suicide was the “precipitating factor” that led to my beginning to hear voices.

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Three walls

And two great windows with a door

That breaks full view

Of the pale blue-gray horizon,

Leafless trees,

And unseen lake.

Just outside,

Shimmering drops of last night’s rain

Resting budlike on the delicate twigs of the Korean dogwood

Whose still too slender trunk

Is blocked from view

By the door that keeps out the cold,

Are reminder and promise

Of the delicate white flowers

That will burst forth in glorious profusion

A few weeks before summer.

And within,

Three walls bedecked

With photographs, paintings, and

Book-laden shelves that mingle

With cards, more photographs,

A television, and kitsch;

The bric à brac collections

Of a lifetime,

Filled with memories, hopes,

Accomplishments,

And dreams;

Of people loving and loved,

And travels to far-off and domestic places

In the world, and within my own . . .

And so many other people’s . . . Minds

Each object, each image, each book,

A memory of what was, is,

And might have been.

Every book a part of me,

Irrespective of whether I’ve read it;

Because in my hunger

And curiosity,

When I considered the title,

And held it in my hands

I wanted to know what lay within,

To know and understand the perspective

Of the person who created it,

To see the world through their eyes

And consider whether their vision is truer,

Or broader than my own,

Or perhaps simply resonant,

And that too is something.

And it’s fine that I’ve not read

Fully half if not more

Of the books I own.

Why, just last Christmas I read an article

In Inc. Magazine of all places,

About the importance of owning more books

Than we can ever read,

As a reminder of our limitations,

And source of intellectual humility.

So lovely to know

That at least where books are concerned,

Overindulgence is a virtue,

And dreams do come true.

© Claire Bien

February 2018, June 2023

I wrote this poem while confined to my recliner following foot surgery in January 2018.

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“My Sister” (for Hilde Weisert, and her daughter)

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“My Sister” (for Hilde Weisert, and her daughter)

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My sister’s skin is pale,
and the light is dim,
perhaps I sleep
and am dreaming.
She questions me,
but I have no breath,
and I stumble
as I reach out, towards her.
Her laughter as she leaves,
is like bells on a black camel,
in the wind, in the desert,
at night.

(Scott Norman, Fall ’77)

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1.
You’re sitting there,
and it's getting harder to breathe.
It feels as if a little man, like a gnome,
has crept up the back of your seat,
and dropped a net into your head,
over your brain.
You glance at the woman sitting next to you,
and she isn’t there.
You look at the screen, and it seems unreal,
like a bad film.
Are you in a theater at all?
Are you in a room filled with water?
ARE THERE ANY PEOPLE HERE!?

2.
Show’s over, you’re out in the parking lot,
wondering how to get home.

(Scott Norman Rosenthal, Autumn '82)
(a Dis-Ability Coming-Out poem,
for Colin Kempner, and for Judith Wright)

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Refuse of stars.
Hemmed by streets.
Seeking skies
untainted.
Mind dims.
Pain encircles.
Stay on your pedestals.
Drink your own lightning!
We are more than the ledgers of our naming.
Louder than the silence of our living.
(Scott Norman Rosenthal, Spring, ‘23)

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Sandra Cheng is a peer advocate with lived experience, a voice hearer, an artist, and the website administrator for Wildflowers' Movement who is also a support group facilitator. The work that is enclosed on this page is a collaboration inspired by a local florist (Gregor Gileta) who once had a store called "Green Space Flowers." Sandra was in charge of building his newest website. She thought that "space flowers" might be a great idea for the "Wildflowers' Movement" as the cosmos would be the largest space our group could possibly influence. However, little did she know that this idea was already consumed in 1978 with "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". She's thinking of making a Wildflowers' Movement t-shirt mashup that says "Well, why not a space flower?"
Here are Sandra's personal notes about the creative process:

The actual artwork is a collaboration as most of my work is created from Photoshop collagework from other artists in the public domain. I hope that these collaborative efforts are received well.

Please find a robust version of this description online, & more pictures at https://wildflowersmovement.com/#credits
along with all images and specific notes about the creative process, as well as source credits for each image and any fragment used in those images.

# data[].attributes.body
Sandra Cheng is a peer advocate with lived experience, a voice hearer, an artist, and the website administrator for Wildflowers' Movement who is also a support group facilitator. The work that is enclosed on this page is a collaboration inspired by a local florist (Gregor Gileta) who once had a store called "Green Space Flowers." Sandra was in charge of building his newest website. She thought that "space flowers" might be a great idea for the "Wildflowers' Movement" as the cosmos would be the largest space our group could possibly influence. However, little did she know that this idea was already consumed in 1978 with "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". She's thinking of making a Wildflowers' Movement t-shirt mashup that says "Well, why not a space flower?"
Here are Sandra's personal notes about the creative process:

The actual artwork is a collaboration as most of my work is created from Photoshop collagework from other artists in the public domain. I hope that these collaborative efforts are received well.

Please find a robust version of this description online, & more pictures at https://wildflowersmovement.com/#credits
along with all images and specific notes about the creative process, as well as source credits for each image and any fragment used in those images.

# data[].attributes.body
Sandra Cheng is a peer advocate with lived experience, a voice hearer, an artist, and the website administrator for Wildflowers' Movement who is also a support group facilitator. The work that is enclosed on this page is a collaboration inspired by a local florist (Gregor Gileta) who once had a store called "Green Space Flowers." Sandra was in charge of building his newest website. She thought that "space flowers" might be a great idea for the "Wildflowers' Movement" as the cosmos would be the largest space our group could possibly influence. However, little did she know that this idea was already consumed in 1978 with "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". She's thinking of making a Wildflowers' Movement t-shirt mashup that says "Well, why not a space flower?"
Here are Sandra's personal notes about the creative process:

The actual artwork is a collaboration as most of my work is created from Photoshop collagework from other artists in the public domain. I hope that these collaborative efforts are received well.

Please find a robust version of this description online, & more pictures at https://wildflowersmovement.com/#credits
along with all images and specific notes about the creative process, as well as source credits for each image and any fragment used in those images.

# data[].attributes.body
Sandra Cheng is a peer advocate with lived experience, a voice hearer, an artist, and the website administrator for Wildflowers' Movement who is also a support group facilitator. The work that is enclosed on this page is a collaboration inspired by a local florist (Gregor Gileta) who once had a store called "Green Space Flowers." Sandra was in charge of building his newest website. She thought that "space flowers" might be a great idea for the "Wildflowers' Movement" as the cosmos would be the largest space our group could possibly influence. However, little did she know that this idea was already consumed in 1978 with "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". She's thinking of making a Wildflowers' Movement t-shirt mashup that says "Well, why not a space flower?"
Here are Sandra's personal notes about the creative process:

The actual artwork is a collaboration as most of my work is created from Photoshop collagework from other artists in the public domain. I hope that these collaborative efforts are received well.

Please find a robust version of this description online, & more pictures at https://wildflowersmovement.com/#credits
along with all images and specific notes about the creative process, as well as source credits for each image and any fragment used in those images.

# data[].attributes.body
Sandra Cheng is a peer advocate with lived experience, a voice hearer, an artist, and the website administrator for Wildflowers' Movement who is also a support group facilitator. The work that is enclosed on this page is a collaboration inspired by a local florist (Gregor Gileta) who once had a store called "Green Space Flowers." Sandra was in charge of building his newest website. She thought that "space flowers" might be a great idea for the "Wildflowers' Movement" as the cosmos would be the largest space our group could possibly influence. However, little did she know that this idea was already consumed in 1978 with "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". She's thinking of making a Wildflowers' Movement t-shirt mashup that says "Well, why not a space flower?"
Here are Sandra's personal notes about the creative process:

The actual artwork is a collaboration as most of my work is created from Photoshop collagework from other artists in the public domain. I hope that these collaborative efforts are received well.

Please find a robust version of this description online, & more pictures at https://wildflowersmovement.com/#credits
along with all images and specific notes about the creative process, as well as source credits for each image and any fragment used in those images.