February 28, 2007
...ARRRRRT!
Oh goodness, forgive me. I've had a dreadful day today and finally getting to get on a computer for the first time in a week and a half has made me a little giddy. I'm just so exhausted from spending the whole night on the stone-with-a-hole-cut-in-it toliet while my body tried to turn itself inside-out, then came into Takoradi today (missing my classes to do so) to renew my visa and buy more yellow paint for my kids to finish their paintings but alas couldn't do EITHER. Because sometimes, Ghana sucks.
I was so exhauseted that I simply cracked at the immigration office earlier...not very Laura Lee at all.
But now I have messages, glorious messages from home! Oh, I needed that...Anyway, here's the arrrrt I promised! ;) This first is a portrait of something very important to me here in Ghana...My Bucket of Water. At the end of the day I get my bucket of cool water to bathe with, and oh how I look forward to it every evening! You especially realize how important it is when there is no water.
This next painting is one I've been intening to make for a while, it's a painting of (almost) all the local Adinkra symbols. Each one has a meaning or a moral behind it, and I find them very interesting. The first symbol called "sankofa" on the top left looks surprisingly like the tattoo on my wrist.
This next picture is like my ode-to-Escher-drawing-within-a-drawing. Normally when I am making a work of art, there is some point during the process when all hope is lost. I decide the piece is doomed. And *that *is when I take a risk I normally wouldn't take, like a last-resort bribe to talk myself into going on with it. And somehow this risk always works out, and indeed saves the artwork....Upon coming to this realization, I could clearly see the parallel between my art and life. Because in my life it's the same sequence. The big risks I take are not born from bravery, but originally stem more out of sheer desperation. Hence the art imitating life drawing below...
Currently reading: Last week I read "Kiss the Girls" by James Patterson, which is so not my literary taste but it was the ONLY book Mary had at her place for me to borrow when I finished "Kafka on the Shore"...Desperate times call for splashy-suspense novels.
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