Tribute

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We all mourn differently.

In the second term of my first year, I was given an assignment for interdisciplinary practice that entailed doing something five times a day for fifteen days. At the end of the fifteen days we presented our work to each other, explaining what we did and why. For my project, I painted five portraits a day, for fifteen days. I will unfortunately never get the opportunity to meet each person I painted because they all past away one day before I painted them.. to elaborate I did this by simply doing an online search every day for people who had passed away the day before, and worked with what images I found. I also kept a book with the pictures, documenting the names and the courses of death (if available) of the people I painted.

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At the beginning of my interdisciplinary lectures I was struggling to take any of the information in. I still haven’t taken in the horrible reality that my dear friend Adam had passed away while he was walking along the shoreline the weekend before. It seemed that everything was continuously triggering me, from the opening poem to the walking artists. While everyone left that lecture feel inspired by the artists shown, I left in a daze. Fogged filled death accompanied by the vivid images and scenarios crafted by my imagination of Adam’s death. Instead of pretending this had not happened, I decided to embrace this dark fog and mold it into art. I refer to it as a fog because that’s the best way to describe how I felt whilst painting these portraits. I wasn’t thinking too much because if I did then I would have fallen into my whirlpool of tears…. but never tell your tutor that art is therapy.

© 2019 by Dottie-May Aston, Tribute, The Book.

Make the most of your life because you could just be taking a walk for it to slip away…