Taking risks and trying something new: a freeing approach to our second zine

For the second issue of daróg, the theme came to mind for a number of reasons. "Free" was solidified as the right choice for our December issue when Hayden and I began to embrace the meaning of the word and watched the artwork start to come together.

Image description: the cover image, titled "Palestine", was the first piece I wanted to be a part of the issue. A navy blue watercolor wave cascades across the image from the left upper third to the right lower third, consisting of separate brush strokes that start out opaque at the top and get darker towards the bottom. A light forest green background fades into white at the top of the image. The name of the zine, "daróg", sits in the center of the image, overtop the blue wave, blending its transparent pink color with the blue wave, resulting in rich, magenta colored stripes on the text. The blue wave represents the Jordan River and the Palestinian liberation phrase, "from the river to the sea".

My next contribution is a multimedia experiment featuring a soothing clarinet riff and a visual animation. While I played clarinet in high school and college, I haven't played much since then. I'm looking forward to continuing to incorporate music into my visual art projects and start to find my own sound. I chose to incorporate a reflecting pool and a neon, abstracted mountain landscape as a meditative visual to accompany the melody.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/db9810_aae9748765c24828abff35728abba20c/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Video description: video features a repeating clarinet riff and original digital animated painting. The audio is a cover of a repeating refrain originally from "Escapism" (Steven Universe). The visual component is a square cropped animated digital painting with a rich periwinkle background featuring abstracted, semi-transparent, pink mountain shapes overlapping each other on the upper two thirds of the image. The lower third has an elongated (horizontally) shimmering light blue pool with wavy edges and the word "free" at the bottom, all slowly rippling along with 7, semi-transparent, digitally painted small white stars that float in front of the pink mountain shapes.

My next two contributions are finger-paintings from a series I created during the summer of 2024, in my final days leading up to leaving Wisconsin. I had been moving these semi-dirty canvases around with me for years, not knowing how I wanted to use them. It was the freeing concept of finger-painting and the deadline of moving across the country that motivated me to take the risk and claim the canvases.

Image description: 14" square white canvas with light cobalt smeared over bare canvas, blended with a green splotch on the upper left and a yellow splotch just below and left of center. A gray/purple is smeared in the bottom left corner, and red smears the right bottom corner. Black knuckle prints stain the center and symmetrically surround the center like flower petals, spreading out to the edges of the canvas.

Image description: 14” square canvas layered with navy blue, black, and gold acrylic paint with splotches of red and green. Gold paint is smeared along the edges and thinly across the canvas horizontally, highlighting the texture of the black and blue finger strokes that stretch across the canvas, from the bottom left to the top right. Straight and wavy finger-strokes angled to the top right of the canvas reveal a horizontally oblong light blue shape underlying the black and gold paint over top of it.

My final contribution to our December 2024 zine was yet another experiment for me. The photo features a location dear to my heart, Washoe Valley, NV. I lived near there for a couple of years and fell in love with the eastern Sierras. The colors of the sky, the mountains, and the plant life are simply enchanting. I took this photo after being away for over three years and it was a magical experience to see it again. The barbed wire and telephone lines were the perfect features to stage new handwritten prose. I was intent on doing the writing and sketch in my own hand, but my dominant hand was too sore from doing art and computer work! So I wrote and drew with my left hand and hoped it would be legible. I really like the result, and it's encouraging me to continue practicing with my left hand. I was meditating on concept of freedom - what it means to me and how I visualize it. The balance of nature feels like freedom to me, and it's a truth that I pursue in my art. Nature has been isolated, removed, harvested, and bleached. Despite humans being a part of nature, there are many who believe we need to be separate. Nature does indeed persist, it just has an evolved identity now, I suppose. The separation is and has been traumatic, but there are still ways to reconnect.

Image description: 6" square mixed media collage featuring a digital photo of a light pink/gray sky looking south over Washoe Valley at sunset, with three telephone lines cutting through it, the sky getting pinker the closer it gets to the blue mountain range in the lower sixth of the image. The eastern Sierra foothills surrounding Washoe Lake cascade down from the bottom righthand corner (Lake Tahoe Basin to the west), smoothing out and down towards the Great Basin Desert to the east. At the bottom border of the image are the tops of green and mustard yellow shrubs (piñon pine, sagebrush and rabbitbrush). They and the mountains are framed by an out of focus barbed wire fence with one post framing the tallest mountain peak on the right. Digitally layered writing reads, "free is the wind / as the mist and the sea. / ah, to be both free and / connected...the primordial / urge to exist in harmony." The script is shaky and was written in the less dominant hand. With a transparent gray color and a darker edge, the words blend in with the gray/pink sky and telephone lines behind them. Below the words are four swirls indicating wind, above three wind-blown flowers in the same handwritten style as the prose.

It was interesting and challenging to explore a concept with a definitive lack of constraints and a scarcity. Freedom seems to be both internal and external, natural and human-made. It seems our individual freedoms exist in a paradox, one which we are constantly trying to find balance in. There is internal and external work to be done if we want to pursue freedom. While there are those who believe their freedom is more important than others, there are also those who believe in freedom for all. Seeking balance within these paradoxes, I hope to find answers about how to both cope with and better this contradictory world.