Where does ‘it’ come from? | Amelia Ah You | Artist | The Ten Collective
Every day we do ‘things’. While some things please us, others… well, not so much.
Whether you are a practicing artist or someone who just likes to dabble and play with colours, clay, metal, or simply toss ideas in your head - the sky is the limit in how these ‘things' are expressed and brought to life.
Below are examples where the ‘it’ comes from for me.
This painting represents the view out of my living room window. I am moved by the view. I paint it.
While meandering in a swamp, I found the play of light on the moss giddy and mysterious. I paint it.
The sense of simplicity and quiet in the Canadian artist Jean-Paul Lemieux’s work inspired this piece “Sunday Outing”.
This one… I really enjoyed the process of making it and very happy with the result. All about freedom, mark making and play.
As I stumbled across these passages in Rachel Carson's book, The Sea Around Us, they inspired me to convey the depth of the sea as a colour field. There may be other variations on the theme in the future.
“The deep blue water of the open sea far from land is the color of emptiness and barrenness; the green water of the coastal areas, with all its varying hues, is the color of life."
“The unrelieved darkness of the deep waters has produced weird and incredible modifications of the abyssal fauna. It is a blackness so divorced from the world of the sunlight that probably only the few men who have seen it with their own eyes can visualize it. We know that light fades out rapidly with descent below the surface. The red rays are gone at the end of the first 200 or 300 feet, and with them all the orange and yellow warmth of the sun. Then the greens fade out, and at 1000 feet only a deep, dark, brilliant blue is left. In very clear waters the violet rays of the spectrum may penetrate another thousand feet. Beyond this is only the blackness of the deep sea.”
”…The sea is blue because the sunlight is reflected back to our eyes from the water molecules or from very minute particles suspended in the sea. In the journey of the light rays into deep water all the red rays and most of the yellow rays of the spectrum have been absorbed, so when the light returns to our eyes it is chiefly the cool blue rays that we see. Where the water is rich in plankton, it loses the glassy transparency that permits this deep penetration of the light rays. The yellow and brown and green hues of the coastal waters are derived from the minute algae and other microorganisms so abundant there.” passages from “The Sea Around Us” by Rachel Carson