Painting Angels, part 3

Painting Angels, part 3

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

Painting Angels, part 2

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 Angels

Painting Angels

The first angel was an accident. Or I could say it just arrived. I was in a dark place, and all I could do was turn to art. I had always put my life on paper, pulling the terrible out of me so I could breathe. I began a painting, Fallen 1, from one of my drawings of broken people/creatures and put mountains in the background. When people came by, they saw an angel: the unfinished mountains in the background had become wings that sprung from the its back.

 

 

I began to adapt the concept of the fallen angel in other paintings; the angel had been removed from heaven, but perhaps in my version, returning was a possibility.