Monday, January 5, 2009

Art Journal - a new page and an old one, amended.


" ... in the east the cloud-flower blossoms ..."
Collage with paint and marker pen. This is an earlier page which I made darker and added the image of Fat Man.

Drawing with pastels and marker pen. I realise that the column of the mushroom cloud should be much higher, but I needed to fit it all onto the page.
I did these two pages after seeing Dr Atomic, an opera about Robert Oppenheimer and the last days of testing the bomb at Los Alamos. (Music by John Adams and libretto by Peter Sellars. It is one of the Met Goes to the Movies series.)

5 comments:

Linda Sue said...

Anairam! I LOVE your style- see how you do that thing!!! And you see what I mean about me not knowing when to stop! Perhaps, in time, mine will be better- easier to look at. Clutter is my issue- including my brain- I think it comes from having very little paper in my childhood and having to make every fraction of it useful. I think that I did two that are less clumped up...will work on it now that I have an abundance of paper!
Love your pages always- even the dark one- funny what comes out when one begins a page, isn't it- better than therapy!

Anonymous said...

Very moving. What gets me is the way they gave the bombs pet names: little boy and fat man. As if to anthropomorphise these deadly objects. But perhaps that is rather apt, if not ironic.
Your journal is great.

eilandkind/islandchild said...

I love these pages.

Anairam said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anairam said...

linda sue - I am so glad you like my style. I know what you mean about clutter - I am also clutter-brained. But I do not feel your pages are cluttered - I really like them, and how you build them around the idea or word you have in mind. I was just looking at your new pages this morning - they are absolutely fantastic - they zing!

anonymous - Yes, and I must say that I was very moved by the opera. Unfortunately the music is not my style, but the production was amazing. The opera ends with the test-bomb exploding - lots of billowing white cloth - and then words come up on a sort of screen, and a Japanese woman asks for water. Her children needs water. It was an incredibly powerful moment and brought one back from all the philosophical rhetoric to the impact the bomb had on one Japanese woman and her family.

eilandkind - Thank you! (I also liked your "fly" page!)