Reading The Obits, pen and ink on graph paper, doodle © 2007-2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
Inspired by this post: The Uses Of Sorrow – What Is It About Obituaries?
April 9, 2007 by ybonesy
Reading The Obits, pen and ink on graph paper, doodle © 2007-2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
Inspired by this post: The Uses Of Sorrow – What Is It About Obituaries?
Posted in Art, Culture, Death, Doodling, Jugular, Love, Obituaries & Epitaphs, Spirituality | Tagged Death, drawing of someone reading the obituaries, honoring death, obituaries, reading obituaries, the practice of doodling, ybonesy doodles | 19 Comments
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WOW. I’m completely blown away by this artwork.
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Thank you. I really must learn how to do more with the computer piece once I scan it in. So much to learn, so little time to learn it.
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I love it full size, full color. But I know what you mean. The learning curve on all of this is at warp speed. Time, time, time.
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This is an amazing piece YBnSY. I love the colors. Very powerful image. Thanks for sharing.
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The colors in this painting have a powerful way of drawing me in warmly and gently, even though the woman in the picture is in pain. Absolutely gorgeous.
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Thank you so much for the comments. Santa Dolorosa is one of my favorite saints. She is always depicted with a dagger in her heart. She feels our pain. I would say I paint her a lot, except I don’t paint so much as to say I paint anything a lot. But among the paintings I have, she figures prominently.
I included thumbnail sketches of how she looks without the little tiled hearts all around her. You can see in the bottom set the one closest to the original painting. These are all small paintings. All watercolor, which is easy to play with the colors. I suppose oil painters would say that oil is easier to mix colors.
I’ll try to find a link on Santa Dolorosa. I’ll think you’ll appreciate knowing more about her.
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Here she is:
From Wikipedia: Our Lady of Sorrows (or, in Spanish, Nuestra Senora de los Dolores)
And from Mexico Connect, which is a site I like to go to to look up saints.
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I’ve always liked your art ybonesy. Very folksy.
This year was the 10th anniversary of my father’s death. Losing him changed a lot of things. My wife said to me only about 3 days ago, “If your dad was still alive, you wouldn’t be here in Venezuela.” She’s probably right.
Since getting married, my wife’s family has suffered through several family members passing. My favorite member of her family was Tia Amada. Even though I could never have a deep conversation with her (my Spanish sucks and it was even suckier back then), Tia Amada was a funny woman, and she made the best coffee I’ve ever had. Her and I had a good relationship. We liked each other a lot.
She fought cancer for about 15 months when it finally got her. Its been about two years now and we/I still miss her.
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I still remember your father’s death. Do you know I once wrote about it, it was so vivid to me?
Do you know the word Amada means “loved one” or “lover”? You probably do. Tia Amada was amada, que no?
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Amada was lovely. She was grumpy and grouchy too, but quite funny. I said my good byes to her about a week before she passed. She was laying in a hammock in her bedroom. It was the most comfortable place for her.
I think you met my dad at the Signal Peak Challenge. He was a good father. Very supportive in all my weirdness. I know he knew he was dying but wouldn’t say anything. He insisted I go to Marti Gras (the real Lousiana Cajun Marti Gras, not in New Orleans) with him about a year before he died. I am glad I did. He was trying to show me my roots. We went to some of his old hang-outs, ate oysters, drank beer, lots of fun. It was a good road trip.
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mm,
I’m moved by your reference to you father, how he took you to the Cajun Marti Gras to show you your roots. It’s important to know where we came from. And to remember. I am heading to Georgia in June with my Mother to revisit my own Southern roots. I want to hear all the stories. I don’t want them to be forgotten.
You know, there’s that James Baldwin quote about writers “excavating their roots.” I ran across it last year when I was doing some research on Baldwin. I’ll have to look it up.
Did you learn anything from your father about your roots that you’d be willing to share?
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My dad moved us to New Mexico in 1962. I was about 18 months old and my younger sister was still an infant.
Having southern roots, but never really lived there is kind of strange. I grew up with southern values and expectations from my southern parents. But growing up and living in New Mexico gave me a more open/liberal point of view about people and cultures. New Mexico’s open-ness and acceptance, also rubbed off on my parents. They were/are much more open-minded.
Growing up in NM, we used to make regular summer trips to Louisiana and Arkansas (my mom’s side), but that trip in 1996 was my last trip to Louisiana.
Louisiana is great. On the trip with my dad, I met members of family had never met before, like genuine Cajun cousins of dad’s. These guys knew the bayous like the back of their hands. I met a great-uncle, brother of my paternal grandmother who flew planes in WWII, ferrying generals around. He had a lot of interesting stories; his favorite planes to fly were the B-17 and the P-51, and the most difficult was the P-38.
I ate great food as expected, heard great chanka-chank Cajun music, drank beer with uncles and cousins, and I saw my grandfather for the last time before he died. I went out to the old homestead of my grandparents (my grandfather was a rice farmer). This was where we would spend a few days each summer. It still smelled the same.
But there is also part of Louisiana I despise. There is a deep bigotry towards African Americans. I have one aunt (married to my dad’s youngest brother) that was (still is?) the worse. I hated the way she spoke.
I married a dark skinned woman, so dark, she’d be considered black in the USA (in Venezuela her skin color is referred to as “negra”). She is my soul-mate, which I always thought was a hokey term until I met her. She’s just great and makes me laugh all the time. I am afraid if I was to take her to Louisiana, we’d be shunned from the family. It is one of my biggest fears, but it would be interesting to take her to a family reunion. We might clear the venue.
mm
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I always found that to be a fascinating thing about you, MM–that you were a New Mexican yet had this whole other southern life. I kind of envied it, if you want to know the truth.
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mm,
I grew up in Georgia in the 60’s until I was almost 12; then we moved to the North. Southern culture was full of bigotry. But you know what? After I moved to Pennsylvania as a pre-teen, I found there was bigotry there, too, and a lot of it. It’s just that people aren’t as open about it.
I have found the same in Minnesota. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago when I had a conversation with an African American woman here who told me she had experienced far more racism in Minnesota than she ever did in the South. I have experienced prejudice here, too, around sexual preference.
There is a lot of hate. It’s not just in the South. It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with my Southern heritage and be proud of it. Part of what has changed me is to see that the newer generations can change. Attitudes change when we expose people to who we are as people, no matter what the color, religion, or sexual preference.
Love is the greatest forum for change. If someone loves me as a person, they most often make a choice to see past what they don’t like about me. Or what they’ve learned not to like about me due to their own prejudices. It becomes less important. They see me more as a person.
Liz and I went to a cultural exhibit early this year about race. I think it was at the Science Museum of Minnesota. I can’t remember for sure. I wrote about it in a practice. They were having talking circles and trying to open dialogues about underground racism in our culture.
One thing we were struck by was an exhibit about Brazil. I think it said there were over a hundred words for skin color and then it listed them all. There was a place for everyone. No black. Or white. We need more of that in this country. I agree – we need to work more at walking our talk.
Things do change. But it’s slow moving.
Thanks for sharing about your life. Memoir is a wonderful form of writing. When I go South with my mother later this spring to work on my book, I’ll be posting from there. We’ll see what develops.
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