Live Your Life, #1 and #2, both 16″ x 24″, oil on birchwood board, 2011.
Wanting to badly to feel like me again, wanting to paint, and still very sick constantly, very tired and weak, but finally Live Your LIfe #1 with the mixer came easy and I worked for a few days on it, then #2 was a struggle….and then as I got sicker I couldn’t paint again in oil–I just didn’t have the juice. I love the first of these two paintings as much as anything I’ve ever painted, and I think they both speak to the experience of trying to regain one’s normal life with metastatic cancer, especially with brain mets. I am reminded of the Sesame Street song, One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is kinda the same.
These are wonderful Vi!!!! In fact they are my new favorite paintings; I love your use of color… the yellows in the blender, the greens in the thermos, and most of all, the variations in the toilet paper roll!!!
Reminds me of “Girl With A Pearl Earring” when Vermeer says to Griet, “Look at the clouds and tell me how many colors you see…”
I love these paintings as well. They reminds me of a poem I wrote about the everyday joys of laundry. I understand that feeling of how we seek “normalcy” in the everyday when we are going through an experience of deep illness and facing our own limitations and our own mortality.
All the best through your treatment.
Samantha Albert
http://www.ultra-soundsl.org