"ferox virago" 28"x12" mixed media on stretched canvas and acrylic pen on teabags attached to canvas panel (currently on exhibit for art studio events)
I first read of the Whatcom Museum's Call to Artists, months before the deadline. So many of my paintings deal on one level or another with healing that I thought choosing what to submit would be easy. It wasn't. I did think of two paintings as possibilities to submit, but I also was contemplating the word "acts" as I thought about my paintings. How could I create an "act" of healing, I wondered. One week before the entry deadline, I had the idea. I would adapt, and make prominent, the drawing of ferox virago that I had created during the covid period of lockdown and isolation in early 2020. I made that drawing to represent protection for us, particularly during that time to protect us not only from disease, but also to help us transcend and transform during this time of extreme uncertainty that amplified collective and individual fear. It has symbols of the triangle, spiral, stillness, world spirit, the scarab, the turtle, head of spiral horns, and hooves. (See the blog entry from 2020 for details about the inspiration, creation, and meaning.)
Loving glyphs and cave drawings, I decided to use Golden's Coarse Molding Paste with its sandy texture to suggest a rock-like surface. I painted a foundational color I made to look a bit like pinkish-orange feldspar (is my college Geology class paying off?), thinking I could add blue-green veins as I finished making this look as if it was taken from a cave wall. I played with ideas of what to add to the left of the predominant ferox virago, glyphs I had copied from symbolism books and ancient symbols I could find online, as well as what I had seen in rug and embroidered motifs. Some I made up as I played in my sketchbook. This was grand fun and left me with the delicious problem of having to be selective. I think I would have loved doing a whole wall of these. I drew the glyphs and ferox virago with watercolor crayon and went over these drawings with matte medium to stabilize them.
My idea of "act of healing" was to draw the image of ferox virago onto a teabag with my pin type black Uni-Posco acrylic pen. I ended up attaching these to a tea-dyed, raw canvas panel with one stitch taken with the teabag string. The idea is that the viewer, for whom the art and the ferox virago image resonates, creates the act of healing by removing one of the drawings from the canvas panel and takes it for themselves to their homes or to pass on to another.
I finished the art piece late the night before the deadline (took as good of a picture as I could given the poor lighting situation) and submitted the work. On September 1, I participated in Downtown Bellingham Art Walk and gave "ferox virago" a test run. About 10 people took one of the teabag "ferox virago" images home with them. Viewers overall seemed receptive, and we had many rewarding conversations around the art. In addition, one person told me that the act of pulling the stitched piece from the canvas gave her a profound positive feeling. I am grateful for that feedback and all of the feedback I received.
So whether the art is accepted into the show or not, I am most grateful for the inspiration I got to create it. And that came from reading the "Call to Artists" and contemplating the theme.
