Ekphrasis: Art inspired by other Art- across forms

Dimensions: 30 x 24
Submission Url:
About your piece:: This piece was in response to Rupi Kaur's tedx talk titled "I'm taking my body back. I struggled with painting a portrait of Rupi because I was torn between sheer anger at not just the person that abused her but also toward people in my own life, and in my family and friends lives who had had their childlike innocence taken away. I felt that sense of self destructiveness that can be taken out with sharp gestural lines on a canvas, the scraping and slashing on of paint. But contrasting to that was a feeling of not letting the darkness inside overwhelm me, to open the windows and let in the light. I chose to paint the woman hovering on the border of a relationship between ghosts in her past and being at home, holding her pen and trusting her voice.

Dimensions: 24 x 20
About your piece:: Inspired by Kendell Cochrane's poem, Tree of Life.

Dimensions: 40 x 30
Submission Url:
About your piece:: I was inspired by Chopin's piano piece Heroic Polonaise (Op. 53 in A Flat Major). Chopin directs the pianist: Maestoso. This music piece is majestic and powerful, tender and strong. Like the tree, the Heroic Polonaise can bring you to your knees with its sublime intensity; its strength in a storm; its graceful and strong movement. Listen at: https://musescore.com/classicman/scores/55757

Dimensions: 20.8 x 14.8
Submission Url:
About your piece:: Watercolour and ink on watercolour paper. This work is part of a series inspired by Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream story. In the story, the Taoist master writes how he dreamt of being a butterfly and upon waking realized he had been dreaming, but wondered if it could be that he was actually a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. The story speaks about the interdependence between the conscious and the unconscious as well as the processes of spiritual transformation. As a Cuban exile, the story resonated with my own history and that of my birth country. I use this piece to comment on Cuba's totalitarian state, where those who leave the country are called "gusanos" - meaning worms or caterpillars. But as we all know, caterpillars emerge from their cocoons and transform into butterflies, finding their freedom. While inspired in content by the Taoist master, the style of this watercolour and ink work channels Wassily Kandinsky's spiritual art.

Dimensions: 20 x 16 x 0.5
About your piece:: My painting is inspired by the song Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. This song is special to me because my husband was scheduled to sing it at the JdF Christmas Concert 1999, but sadly got too sick and passed away before the performance. This was just before COVID. The attached verse was his special favourite.

Dimensions: 17 x 3 x 4
About your piece:: I am inspired by the underwater photography of National Geographic photographer Stephane Granzotto whose photos brought to the world the understanding that sperm whales sleep en masse (the whole pod), hanging vertically in the water column, 5-15m under the water surface. These are just short, 15-30 minutes naps, and they only have a few a day. Sperm whales are the record holders for the mammals needing the least sleep. I find these pictures mesmerizing and hauntingly beautiful. My Holy Whale I can be hung or it can sit on a table.

Dimensions: 20 x 48 x 0.75
About your piece:: This triptych made of oil and cold wax on canvas is inspired by three poems from the book The Girls with Stone Faces by Arleen Pare. Her poems are, in turn, inspired by the sculpture of the two Canadian sculptures, Florence Wyle and Frances Loring. Specifically, my lines, shapes and marks were inspired by Arleen's; hers by theirs. Individual titles: there's something about three; concerning lips; the way it works.

Sold
Dimensions: 20 x 32 x 1.5
About your piece:: These two artworks- Directions: two and Directions: many, are based on lines from a poem, Heart's Arrow by Arleen Pare. The lines are: art's arrow flies in one direction/ you don't change art/ it changes you

Dimensions: 16 x 12 x 1.5
About your piece:: The fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson, The Nightingale, inspired a painting that incorporated the following poem.

Dimensions: 18 x 24 x 1
About your piece:: Inspired by and relating to Van Gogh's painting of the sunflowers that were offered to Gaugin as an invitation to join Van Gogh's imagined utopian artist colony. I placed a sunflower at my front door as a signal. That act evolved into the following poem and into a series of ink and watercolours. The inked image on display incorporates flowers found growing wild in the tiny, conflicted village where I live, a village once promoted in utopian- in terms as “planned for happiness”, along with discarded remains of fish caught in the local bay – head, tail and ear.

Sold
Dimensions: 12 x 12 x 1.5
About your piece:: Generally, I paint from photographs I take. Reading about this show, and its meaning, inspired me to search my imagination to render a vision of William Wordsworth's poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud".