artist life | Jennifer Hosein Artist

Project 40 Collective: Creator to Creator Interview, Doyali Islam

by admin | Aug 30, 2017 | Poetry Blog

Doyali Islam; photo: Sanchuri Sur

Here’s the latest Creator to Creator interview from Project 40 Collective, featuring the poet Doyali Islam talking about her creative career, what draws her to poetry, inspiration, current themes, and her favorite noodle.

Her poetry makes me look at everything that I have known, that I see, that I imagine, and see beauty and meaning in them. Her poems pick you up and set you down in places and times: to the door where the cat crouches in cat and door, to her mother’s “cramped mustard kitchen,” to Yugoslavia in 1944, to the South Hebron hills. Her poems influence me to write and to observe! I am humbled by her writing.

Read through to the very end to read her thoughts on my art.

Creator to Creator: Doyali Islam

Painting Angels, part 3

by admin | Aug 8, 2017 | Art Blog

The first angel was an accident. In my darkest time, the angels that followed were like the work I’d done years before, of demons and almost-humans that reflected my life and observations and what came to me in the night.

Then it came time to put the darkness away. I began to paint angels that would keep watch over us. Now I believe in Happy. I think that if you believe, you can find it.

Painting Angels, part 2

by admin | Aug 1, 2017 | Art Blog

When I was still in the dark place, I wrote a poem,

only feathers string me up across the sky, one nudge or wrinkle and I fall, crash through violet dusk and skyscrapers, this wingless, landlocked, flattened creature of despair

that described the fragile threads/feathers that kept me from falling through the sky. I drew a version of the poem, and what appeared shortly after on my canvas was an angel that hovered above the city, pulled upward by her wings. People saw in her what they needed to: a guardian angel, an angel of hope or an angel of sorrow. That painting is Angel Over the City.

The painting appears on the cover of Brandon Pitt’s powerful book of poetry, Tender in the Age of Fury. For more about Brandon Pitts, visit http://www.brandonpitts.com/

Painting My Mother

by admin | Jul 19, 2017 | Art Blog

I drew my mother for the first time when I was in art school, and didn’t draw her again until she had her first, then second stroke, and became like a child to me. Nothing prepares you.

When my mother passed, I was lost. I did not know how to survive but I started to paint, madly, and write, always. I pulled the despair out of me and onto paper.

I painted my pain, then angels, and then my mother began to nudge me, telling me it was time to paint her. I looked for her in the wedding photos that were taken when she was just nineteen. I found her in the hours, days and weeks that I spent looking into her face, her eyes.

Beloved mother, you never leave my side. Your beautiful, gnarled, arthritic feet rest in my lap, and I am home. You lie in the shadows of me, keeping me from harm.

Photo of my mother, Zalakha, with my daughter, Natasha, in the summer of 2010, before the first stroke.

Getting ready for Saturday night at Free Times Cafe

by admin | Jul 8, 2016 | Art Blog

WORDS AND MUSIC on Saturday, July 9th at 8 p.m. at the Free Times Cafe is only one sleep away! I’ll be performing alongside some very talented folks: dub poet Clifton Joseph and singer-songwriters Carmen Toth and Tim Maxwell!

I will be presenting some new pieces in my set, and will be trying out some visual effects for the first time. Also, there will be a musical surprise at the end! I hope you can make it!

A few of the pieces I will present are not so new, and very intertwined with the drawings and paintings I was working on then. The dark days. Places I have left far behind. Here are a few of those paintings: