Showing posts with label alice walker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alice walker. Show all posts

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Reverence for the Leaves

Time to share a treasure. Three years after graduation I finally had the courage to attempt to send Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple as well as my favorite poet, a series of paintings I did as a student based upon her work. The assignment was to make a stencil and use it over and over to create a series of paintings with a nice relationship to each other. I made a stencil from a leaf I found, and then created conceptual paintings based upon poem fragments from Alice Walker's anthology Her Blue Body Everything We Know. My series is titled Reverence for the Leaves. Though it took a lot of phone calls and being shuffled around, I was surprised how easy it was to get connected to her assistant, whom I unfortunately woke up one morning. Nevertheless, she gave me her address, and I sent a copy of the series to Ms. Walker care of her assistant—uncertain she'd ever actually see it. Shortly after Valentines Day, 1998, I received not only a card back from Alice Walker herself, but it was a handmade card on construction paper with a photo she took in Cuba taped to the front. Flattered beyond belief, I share it here.