I mentioned several months ago that I am participating in an art book collaboration, a Traveling Book Club, if you will, with nine other artists that I met through Ardith Goodwin’s Push Past Ordinary Society for Creative Dreamers. It’s been a wonderful source of friendship, support, and inspiration for me and if you could use some of that in your life, find out more and send an email here: https://pushpastordinary.com/push-past-ordinary-society
This month was a ton of funI’m working in my friend E.W.’s book. She is an avid writer as well as visual artist, so it is only fitting that the theme of her book is Poetry in Motion. She asked each of us to create a spread inspired by our favorite poem, quotation, or lyric. I decided to use Shel Silverstein’s poem, Colors. His writing is so simple, clever, lyrical and his illustrations so playful that it’s always been a favorite of mine to read with my kids and now, grandkids. This particular poem to me is about possibilities and the certainty of becoming the spectacularly colorful butterfly growing inside each of us. It goes like this:
Colors
My skin is kind of sort of brownish
Pinkish yellowish white.
My eyes are greyish blueish green,
But I'm told they look orange in the night.
My hair is reddish blondish brown,
But it's silver when it's wet.
And all the colors I am inside
Have not been invented yet.
I’m riffing on Picasso’s Lying Naked Woman (Les voyeurs) as my visual starting place to paint this poem. Now I’m all kinds of inspired to study Picasso a bit more and incorporate some of his approach into my work.
