"Don't Paint the Sun Anymore!"

This collage is my response to The Midnight Sun, one of those haunting Twilight Zone episodes where the premise is simple: The Earth has shifted in orbit, the sun grows closer, and what unfolds is the earthlings’ desperation, feelings of isolation, and fear. Families try to escape to cooler regions. Looting ensues. Neighbors are being threatened at gunpoint. Fragile layers of human behavior begin to unravel.

Part of what nudged me to work on this now were our recent heat waves here in the city- and I’m a big fan of the episodes that happen to take place in New York, as The Midnight Sun does.

I began with soft fabrics to suggest Norma’s softness and vulnerability. Her silky slip, and her delicate, feminine demeanor. 

Lois Nettleton as Norma

But somewhere in the process, the fabrics became invasive to me, and parasitic. The false sun in the corner looms. Heavy, wrong, oppressive. Black lace flowers (taken from my old chokers) scatter like spores. The materials that were supposed to comfort and adorn now crawl, spread, and choke the fragile watercolors below. Norma herself is marked by a single velvet strip on the lower left. 

Because she is literally a painter in the story, I wanted this collage to lean into a painterly quality. Watercolors and drips create the backdrop. Softness, motion, and a sense of something dissolving under pressure. Melting up instead of down to give it more confusion and a kind of reversal, much like the reveal in the end of this episode.

The title Don’t Paint the Sun Anymore! comes straight from a desperate plea by Norma’s landlady, Mrs. Bronson. Norma paints canvas after canvas of the burning sky until she finally pleads Norma to stop. But how can an artist not record what’s consuming her world?