The art club I joined occasionally does what’s called an art exchange.

This begins with everyone bringing something with them to a meeting. We draw names out of a hat and your give your “thing” to the person whose name you’ve drawn. That person then creates a new “thing” (a song, painting, story, whatever) based on what they’d received. And the exchange can continue from there as a sort of creative game of telephone – all media are welcome.

I love it when we get to the part of our meeting where we unveil our exchanges…it’s like Christmas morning! Last week we were treated to stories, poems, paintings, a big painted face mask, viola and percussion, and electronic music.

Because this exchange has continued into its fourth turn I decided to document the line of what I’ve dubbed the Ouroboros (an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail): It began as a leather bracelet, became a poem, then a drawing, and I expect this week it will become a song.

ROUND 1 (A Leather Bracelet):

ROUND 2 (Poem by Laura Granfortuna):

What prompts the Ouroboros
To thus consume his tail?

To push his piercing fang
Into his armored scale?

Does he seek completion,
A circle’s perfect poise?

Is he so full of loathing,
That he himself destroys?

Perhaps it is defiance
At God’s unjust design

A premature attrition
Unto the tide of time

Does he begin to waver,
Drunk on his poison blood?

As the heady venom
His veins begins to flood;

Will he continue eating
‘Til he is but a head?

Will he stay there motionless
and withering ’til dead?

Is but this trifling paradox
To make us hesitate?

To lead us to abandon
Fruitless worries for our fate.

ROUND 3 (Drawing by me):

 

UPDATE:

ROUND 4 (Logo Design & Poem):