A Burnt Orange 🧡🤎

  For this Burnt Orange blog, it feels especially fitting to share my small experiment with oranges as part of my winter solstice observation. I’d seen dried oranges appear again and again in winter imagery and seasonal traditions, so I wanted to give that a whirl. One suggestion was to make a garland: slicing the oranges, baking them low and slow (200–225℉ for about two to three hours), and letting the house fill with that bright, citrusy scent. At the same time, I’d been reading about Yule and winter solstice traditions - the honoring of the sun at its lowest point, and the use of citrus, evergreen, spice, and fire to call light back in. I intended to make a garland from the baked oranges, but without twine on hand, I placed them temporarily in one of my small orange bowls. Then added a cinnamon stick, a couple of star anises, and ground nutmeg and cloves to the mix. That was when the arrangement took on a different gravity. What began as decoration shifted into something deeper...

  Nov 6, attempting hex #EA7800 and #E65D00 - A quick nod to a certain Stevie Wonder album I've always cherished This November, I dove into my very first Huevember challenge. I loved the rhythm of it. Something about waking up, meeting the hue of the day, and seeing what could emerge. It felt gradual, organic and instinctive. But the part that caught me off-guard was the community- or rather, the lack of one. Huevember is supposed to be a shared challenge, (right?) A hashtag party and a month-long of, “Hey, look what I made too!” I noticed it early on. Not just that my posts weren’t getting much engagement, but that everyone’s Huevember pieces seemed to be floating in the same lonely algorithm. I’d scroll the hashtags (#Huevember2025 and #HuevemberDay1 for example) and see gorgeous work from artists I didn’t know, and their posts were sitting there with two likes, maybe four. Little comments. Sparse conversation. Just color after color posted into the void. It made the contrast w...

  Ornament For a couple of years, I'd scroll past Inktober drawings on social media. Eventually, in 2019, I decided to try it myself. Ornament is not my first one. My first prompt was ring . I tried to twist it into something spooky, appropriate for October. It ended up being a rough sketch of a woman forced to wear a wedding ring, the band scraping her skin until blood welled up. An evil laughing man hovered in the background. Maybe even a haunted house on a hill. Messy, crude, melodramatic and currently misplaced. I can’t find the original hard copy nor the digital versions anywhere. It seems I deleted the drawing both on my Google photos and social media. Why did I delete it? Was I embarrassed by it? Probably.… But if my first Inktober taught me anything, it’s that the first bad one (or any one for that matter) isn’t the end. It’s just a steppingstone you encounter before things get good. The “worst” day is often just the beginning of something better. If you stay with it, th...

Two Septembers ago, someone from South Carolina bought a print of my piece Connect ASL . It shows the ASL sign for “connect,” two hands linked together. I smiled when I saw the sale go through, mainly because September is Deaf Awareness Month. The timing itself was a little message back to me. I never set out to make art with sales in mind, and so far I don’t make much profit from these occasional sales, but it’s a joy when something I create resonates deeply enough for someone to bring it into their home. I know that feeling well. The pull toward an independent artist’s work, the desire to support them, and the spark of recognition in their vision. To be on the other side of that exchange is humbling, and in this case, it reminded me of an important part of my own story: my years (1998-2006) working as a notetaker for Deaf college students. My path into this work began almost by accident. In 1998, my mother passed away, and I drifted through community college feeling wayward and unfoc...

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 t...

Swan by Aaron Jordan When I met up with my sister and Aaron at a restaurant a few days ago, we didn’t realize that the place we chose was going to be a loud, fun, musically themed Bingo Night with live DJs. Between rounds of 70’s - 2000’s R&B and Soul, the clink of glasses, singing, and bursts of laughter all around, our plans to “catch up” and discuss “the artist’s process” quickly dissolved into jokes, half-finished cocktails, and acceptance that the universe had other plans. So, we improvised. A few days later, I sent Aaron some interview questions online, and he sent me back his answers in the form of voice notes. What follows is Aaron, in his own words, on art as process, the teachers who shaped him, and the value of making “ugly art” on the way to something beautiful. ******************* Q: The print I have in my house (and still on my phone home screen!) Has your perception of it evolved over time? Aaron: When I first did it, it was just for Huevember . There’s a part that ...

Since my dad has been facing an overwhelming number of health issues over the past couple of years, I’ve been thinking about the things he’s loved throughout his life, particularly in art. So today, I want to share something about his favorite painting here. Dad’s not who you would call a “fine art” kind of guy. His passions are more rooted in old, jazzy music and classic Hollywood movies. He doesn’t collect paintings or follow anything related to the visual arts. He once commented that he found Toulouse-Lautrec’s life extremely tragic and he gets a big kick out of Al Hirshfield's celeb drawings, his daughter's name ( Nina ) always hidden somewhere within those swooping, thin lines.  His favorite color is Kelly Green , which happens to be the color of his favorite basketball team, the Boston Celtics. Who knows if that was fate or a happy coincidence?  Dad doesn’t have curated opinions about art movements or theories. But ask him about Frank Sinatra? He can tell you wha...