Time

It’s fleeting.  It’s fragile.  There’s never enough of it and everyone wants more of it.  It plays a pivotal role in many films, as well as everyday life.  Things happen “just in time” or someone or an event has “perfect timing”.  For a concept so abstract, it’s something without which we could not function.  I was inspired by the haunting final track of Inception, a gorgeous soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, one of my favorite composers.  The piece builds and builds, increasing in intensity and emotion, sucking viewers helplessly into the final minutes of the movie.  The piece is aptly titled Time.

I tried to represent the contrast of both the muddy, vague concept of time with its delicate nature.  As with so many things, this painting began one way and went a completely different direction.  It photographed a bit strangely here:  the background is much more muted, but the bronze paint is actually that brilliant.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, so I stepped away from it for a few days.  Remarkably, I still liked it.  In this instance, taking some time was a good thing.

Hadassah

I’ve never suffered the pain of losing a child, though I know others who have.  I’ve never known how to help, how to comfort these friends who have lost in such a way.  A friend of mine has begun a branch of the Elizabeth Ministry, which reaches out to those who have lost a child and teaches their loved ones how to reach out to them, too.

Now, this friend of mine lost her baby girl almost three years ago, so this ministry is extremely close to her heart.  As part of a series of workshops, participants can create a painting to work through some of their grief and make a kind of memorial to their child.  My friend asked me to create a couple of pieces to show and eventually auction off to raise funds for the project.  I sat in front of a small canvas and thought……and thought……and thought.  I had absolutely no experience from which to pull.  I started thinking about my friend’s experience instead: she carried a child within her, knowing that child would not survive.  She went through the pain of childbirth and experienced the new life of her daughter, only to have it quickly taken away.  Her daughter was a little soul none of us got to know, and I cannot imagine the continuing pain of losing your only daughter.  I began to think about that little soul; the colors of her spirit, the impact she made in just that tiny amount of time, and the pieces of her that live within her mother, her father, and her big brother.

Hadassah, you were the inspiration for this one.

A Small Measure of Peace

My dear cousin, Samantha, is one of my greatest encouragers when it comes to my paintings.  However, she is a poor college student and cannot afford to buy one.  She just turned 21, so I thought that perhaps a small painting might be nice for her.  This piece is based on Han Zimmer’s composition “A Small Measure of Peace” from The Last Samurai.

Now, Sam spent some time in India doing mission work, and it affected her in a huge way.  Because of that, I added an element of henna tattoo designs onto the background.  You see them when the light hits it just right:

People Are Jumping Out Of Windows

I remember the second plane hitting and the towers falling.  I remember people running out of the city, the mass exodus across the Brooklyn Bridge, citizens coated in thick layers of dust and dirt and grime.  I remember smoke and fear and sorrow and shock.  What I remember most clearly, though, the first thing I ever think of when I hear “September 11″ is people jumping out of windows.  I remember the horror of watching people just like me, taking a hopeless situation into their own helpless hands and jumping, falling, clothes and limbs flailing about as they plummeted to earth and eternity.  This is my clearest memory of that day.

The Ice Shelf is Melting!

CAVEAT:  The following is a semi-sarcastic tirade of mine.  This is not meant to start political arguments on my blog because, honestly, I just don’t care.  Argue your politics on someone else’s blog.

If you’re still reading:

Global warming was not a smart term to create.  No one understands it.  Everyone keeps expecting temperatures to become higher and higher, all year, until the earth itself bursts into a massive ball of flames.  I believe “climate change” to be a better term.  Summers are far more hot, humid, and unbearable and winters are far more harsh, icy, and unbearable than they were when I was a kid.  There’s been a huge increase in natural disasters, though they cannot be directly linked to climate change.  But, come one!  Russia is on fire! Greenland and the Poles (band name, anyone?) are melting!  Jellyfish are taking over the ocean!

I find the whole climate change/global warming debate interesting: everyone seems to have scientific proof to back his/her opinions.  I saw Al Gore’s film in my college chemistry class……what is it called?  Something with an “I”……I don’t know, I can only think of Inception (awe-some!).  I guffawed at the animation of polar bears becoming trapped on icebergs which floated out into the ocean, slowly melting until the polar bear had to swim for its life.  Some say I have a twisted sense of humor, and that may be/is true, but I think Al went a bit over the top.  The ice shelf may be melting, but I don’t think all the polar bears are so feeble-minded as to hang out on only those parts of ice which are breaking away.  And, seriously, they wouldn’t realize what was happening and shift it to the mainland until they reached the middle of the ocean?!

ANYWAY, I painted the following piece based on some recent images of the melting of the ice shelf in Greenland.  Greenland is melting!!!  I used only three colors and painted about 90% of the piece using a palette knife.  In other words, this piece stretched me in many ways, and I’m really happy with the results.

A Star is Born

I was never a little girl who wanted to grow up to be a ballerina, a princess, or an actress.  Nope, about third or fourth grade I went through my very own “what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up” phase.  The careers I most considered were marine biology, meteorology, and astronomy.  Yeah, I was a bit of a freak child.  Though I went on to do none of those things, I still have a deep fascination for the sciences, especially astronomy.  Have you ever seen any of the images sent back by the Hubble telescope?!  They’re like massive, richly colored paintings, displays of color and light out in the great vastness of space.  Anyway, I was inspired to create a piece based on those miracles of space, namely nebulae, where, quite often, birth is given to new stars.

Nature of Remembering

I was devouring a recent issue of the Smithsonian Magazine when I came upon an interesting article concerning the nature of memories.  A region of the brain, fabulously named the hippocampus, stores the memories we make.  An electronic image was shown in the article, in which the microscopic nerve cells had been stained green to make them more visible.  The gorgeous array is where information is encoded and memories are “made”.  Due to my love for painting bright colors on black backgrounds, I took the intriguing image and painted the following: 

Capturing motion

I was intrigued the day I walked into advanced painting and found a long white sheet billowing in the air from being attached to a fan.  The sheet made beautiful motions, none of them repeating one another.  Our assignment was to capture the motion.  See, I came from a background of realistic painting and decided to take advanced painting for fun my senior year.  The prof was one of my favorites, and I should have known he would be coaxing, if not forcing, me into abstract painting.  Now I was supposed to paint “motion”.  I sat there, thinking about the soft way in which the sheet moved: gentle billows, not energetic flapping.  I followed the lines made by the sheet and decided to minimize my usual techniques, resulting in Transcendence:

“You can learn a lot of things from the flowers.”

One of the things I love about the blogosphere is other artists.  I miss being around other artists all the time, as I was in college.  Blogs give me an opportunity to see what others are doing and to be inspired.  A couple weeks ago, a fellow blogger posed a challenge, to somehow interpret a picture he had posted.  I was fresh out of painting ideas and was curious to see how others would respond, so I painted.

As usual with my work, it took a very different direction from what I was expecting.  As I neared what would perhaps be a finish, I could not stop thinking about how my interpretation was reminiscent of the scene from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland in which a tiny Alice is wandering through a massive garden of flowers.  I kept expecting to see her in her blue dress, tip toeing apprehensively through the giant flowers……so……I painted her into it, too.  The finished product looks nothing like what I was expecting, but it is very much me.

Flight Plan

A painting inspired by a paper airplane?!  Seriously?!  Sure, I could do something with the lines, but the whole class was probably going to do something with lines.  So, I let my mind wander, thinking not necessarily about paper airplanes, but about flight, then flight plans, then my love of maps.  Combining those concepts, I came up with my own Flight Plan.