"Celie"

This piece was made specifically for EBSQ's Alice Walker show.

In an homage to the many great assemblage artists out there, I decided to try my hand in an illustrative assemblage style, which is very different from what I usually produce.  This challenge helped me explore my love for illustration.  What fun (although harder than I ever imagined it would be!)

Celie is a character from Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple.  SHe was a woman on a journey to find joy and beauty in her life... a life that focused heavily on the balance between what fulfilled her soul (literature, reading, her family) and what fulfilled the needs of others (taking care of her husband and his children to the best of her ability, and living in a challenging society).

It is a balancing act that I suspect many can relate to.  What I hope to portray here was the importance of her happy escapes into literature (an affinity that Alice Walker herself shares with Celie) and her ability to take them despite the many ways in which life's circumstances guided and pulled her.  (See the novel in her hand!).