A Burnt Orange 🧡🤎

I'm in the process of converting this black and white Fleetwood Mac T-shirt into a canvas piece. It was getting worn out, the black not as strong and clear as it used to be. I tried reviving it with fabric markers, but that didn't quite do the trick. I tried spraying some gold metallic paint and that was working okay but I'll need a better ventilated space if I want to keep using it. For now, I’m switching to acrylic paint and plan to experiment with other materials later. I'm calling the piece, " Better Put Your Kingdom Up " after my favorite lyric from  Gold Dust Woman , the final track on their 1977 Rumors album.  Rulers make bad lovers You better put your kingdom up for sale My parents had Rumors when it first came out, and it's one of the few contemporary (for its time!) albums my dad actually liked. Out of his entire record collection, maybe 2% was 70's rock or pop- the rest was older, big-band, Rat-Pack era jazz- Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzger...

On December 30, 2020, because of the Gift prompt from inktober52 , I painted Yvette’s Gift . The words on this watercolor piece are the last things my mother wrote to us before she died of cancer in 1998. I tried to give the painting an ethereal, otherworldly quality—cool blues and misty tones, with none of the warm orange hues that usually pull me in. My mother once said her favorite color was blue. I don’t think she chose it with passion. It was simply something calm and agreeable. Still, blue is the color I associate with her. Yvette’s Gift found its way to my aunt Janis on the day before Mother’s Day this year. That afternoon, my sister Christine, Titi Janis, and her wife Amy and I drove up to the lookout point in New Jersey where we scattered my mother’s ashes back in '98 that overlooks the Hudson River- I wondered if I should bring her an offering of some kind. Yvette’s Gift came to mind. But where would I place it? She doesn’t have a traditional grave, just a cross in the...

  Am I continuing my orange theme on purpose, or is this just a coincidence? Honestly... I don’t even know anymore. While the goal of A Burnt Orange is to explore and reflect on art that feels meaningful or interesting to me, it seems many of these works naturally lean toward the warm end of the spectrum. I guess orange really is my north star. This striking digital piece by Aaron Jordan Gabaldon is one I bought a few years ago. It’s full of orange tones- burnt, glowing, and deep, and I loved it immediately. I met Aaron about ten years ago through my sister; they both went to Vassar College. He originally posted this work on November 7, 2020 as part of the Huevember challenge- an art prompt project where participants create work based on a different hue each day of November. It’s similar in spirit to Inktober , another month-long art challenge we’ve both taken part in. Aaron and I used to laugh and roll our eyes about Inktober when we didn’t love the prompts. I’m the type who’ll ...