Prayers Answered

"Prayers Answered"  seems so appropriate for right now -- with only 1.52" of rain in the last 11 months, we are praying for rain daily.

Living in the desert has given me a greater appreciation for the connection and synergy between all things -- the day-to-day struggle for life, stark beauty and ugly pain, florescence, harvest, hunger, and death. Nowhere else is the cycle of dry and rain so apparent.

The native people who lived here for perhaps as long as 15,000 years before the Europeans came had an intimate relationship with the land that was so dependent on rainfall -- even more so after agriculture came to be crucial to their survival. Rainfall was affiliated with life and therefore with fertility.

My collage, "Prayers Answered," just evolved one day as I listened to some Native American flute music, cut images out of old monoprints and paintings, overlapped and juxtaposed colors and shapes.  I let the colors, shapes and textures tell me how to use each piece. A dark piece created with polyester cobwebbing became a night sky with lightning. Birth figures from a monoprint combined with flowers from a monoprint and a shaman figure cut from gold colors.

"Prayers Answered"

I think the final work is one of deep mystery and plain answers -- the connections between prayers and rain, spirituality, life and death.

Inspiration:  Mysterious and compelling images, colors and textures; a deep appreciation of the cycle of life and death in the desert.