http://www.amyjackson.cc/paintings/vietnamwar3.html
So, I must admit, I’ve been painting all this time without blogging to you about my progress. What’s up with that? I don’t know, you all. But at least I’ve been painting and creating and moving along with it, I guess, right? I think I’m internalizing my process a bit.
But there she is up above, number three in the series. There is so much symbolism to the Burnt Umber, the Neutral Gray, the Chromium Green. Even the sort of peacock green, the sulphur yellow … it’s so hard to explain. The colors are symbolic, not graphic, not cartoonish. There is some lyricism and leafery there, some naturalism and Art Deco among the … stuff there but the circles of color symbolize data pools of demographics, race and officers and privates, general combat soldiers — kind of weird to do it that way but I did. The red is always blood; the black is always death. This one is super-surreal, like a bomb just hit and before the screams. Before the reality hits of what just happened, okay? So …
…
There as far as I have planned so far will be three screaming paintings, and I’m painting them in backwards order. Thirdly, the one I’m painting next, a screaming purple grieving kind of older somehow deep cavernous mountainous jungle flower? Hmmm? then I will paint the second, mostly orange in your face bird screaming flower kind of — then lastly the jungle leaf screaming like a split atom. Okay. Those are my thoughts so far, and I feel like there is a lot, a LOT of unspent screaming in me and about Viet-Nam, all around, or I would not being doing One, but THREE of them.
…
so this one has a streak of lightning in it’s mouth like some sort of snake bite or sting … the angular parts around are going to be standard 🙂 jungle for me so not so angular maybe — we shall see —
I really feel like I’m growing so much through the therapeutic nature of this series —
Mau-Don, one of the artist partners in this series, sent me the PBS documentary on the Last Days in Viet-Nam by one of the Kennedy great granddaughters or some such and I was terrified to watch it (since I can barely watch action movies or even the nightly news due to my PTSD) but I was able to watch it and learn a great deal from it, since I was only a kid really in 1975. And was not really hip to the politics of what went on for real right just then. So it was very clarifying and mortifying, sad but for real, really clarifying and grounding for me. Just despair and … hard to say really … it just made a lot of things clear for me and it’s hard to put it any other way than that right now.
That was yesterday and I finished the tiniest details of the painting and did the sketch this morning.
I’m so very very tired all the time but I have to have a life, you know? I’m getting boxes tomorrow morning and will just box up this that and the other here and there until it’s all done and fill the basically empty closet in the studio with boxes … not strain my already strained self. Start slow and early and take it slow and steady. Right?
That’s the plan.
My clothes will start in large leaf lawn garbage bags from hanging up in the closet, and end up folded, 95 % of them, in armoires and such in TN. Funny. And no problem really but a big transition in a way. Once I get there. And now. Like who can decide what to wear transitionally? I’m so used to an enormous choice, right? Ha. Silly girl. I’ll figure it out, don’t worry about me.
Ha.
Okay, now to walk Chipper then rest a while? We shall see.
Thank you for listening! Hope you like the artwork! 🙂
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