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Word Art: Abstract #1

This was a first attempt at what I plan to be a series of pieces that are abstract shapes with words that aren’t completely required to make sense.

Abstract #1
Abstract #1

Wake up to an iridescent sky and razor angular clouds burning in the blood rose glow of a sun that dangles on the horizon but doesn’t move for hours.

Walk outside to perfumed air, sweetened like sugar, brushing against the skin like a flirtatious lover.

All the birds have learned a new set of songs that remind you of the music you heard on the radio from the backseat of the car as a child.

You walk past a man wearing a crisp lavender suit.

He flips a shiny silver coin in his left hand and asks you in a smooth voice if you want to play a game.

His face is trustworthy in its featurelessness, but the coin has a sinister glint when it catches the light and you think it better to continue along the way.

Instead, you find a shiny red ball that seems to change color each time your foot connects with it, and you kick it through the spectrum down a mosaic street of cracked and crazed tiles.

You step aside for a singular vehicle passing through—a brocade tent mounted on wooden carriage wheels, drawn by a pair of blonde ostriches.

A glossy blue dog trots up to where you left the ball and sniffs at it.

As you come closer, the blue dog picks up the ball in its mouth and runs off with it.

The world blurs as you give chase, feet pounding and lungs aching by the time you catch up.

The dog rests at the foot of a large and gnarled tree with feather-white leaves.

It drops the ball at your feet and fixes you with a look of head-cocked curiosity, as if to ask “Why do you strive so hard to retain that which you’d only just acquired by accident?”

A leaf falls lightly from the tree and lands on your forehead to melt into your skin like a snowflake.

“When do we wake up?” you ask the dog.

“Wake?” it asks (this time aloud) “What makes you think we’re asleep now?”

Originally, I tried a jagged edge and red and black ink, but the words that came (I drafted them in a notebook first) were ugly and dystopian and I didn’t like them.  Merely changing one of the potential ink colors to purple was enough to shift my thinking to something more pleasant and after a botched first attempt, I shifted to curves instead of diagonals and did the tricky work of breaking the color exactly at the line even if a word intersected.  The result is something that looks halfway decent from a distance and hopefully intrigues on closer examination.

I’m running out of frames to play with, so a trip to the thrift shop may be in order.  I hope I’ll be able to get more done soon.

Prints of this work are available here.

The original has been sold.

 

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