Life Is In The Balance

On September 9th, I had the wonderful opportunity speak with an enthusiastic group of Narrows Botanical Gardens visitors about the Life Is In the Balance series of drawings. I briefly discussed my academic background and related work from my fifty year career as a professional artist. There were questions about the materials used in the original drawings and how they were reproduced to be weather resistant. I talked about each one of the drawings in the order they were created and identified the plants and where they can/could be found in the gardens, when seasonally appropriate.     Photo:Luz Diaz The most informative for the visitors, and the most fun for me was to go around the gardens and visit a few of the locations where they could see the plants that inspired me.  As luck would have it, the milkweed seed pods were "ripe" and full of seeds. We reminisced about our intrigue as children with the floating seeds. We all had forgotten how soft they are. Photo: Luz D...

Monarch and Milkweed; in progress     Today I am laying out Monarch and Milkweed, the fourth drawing in my Life is in the Balance series funded by the New York State Council on the Arts. These drawing are inspired by a lifetime of immersing myself in the natural world and my experiences as a recent transplant to Brooklyn, NYC. The series is influenced by Islamic geometric art - a beautiful marriage of science and art. I have been creating art referencing this geometry for over 40 years. I appreciated it on a purely visual level but as I am learning more about the philosophy, I realize it is the patterns that are important. Syed Jan Abas and Amer Shaker Salman in Symmetries of Islamic Patterns indicate that the geometry mirrors the harmony of nature and defines that which is infinite and perfectly beautiful. So  it is actually a marriage of science, art and spirituality. It is the significance of seeing those patterns in life that really hit me emotionally. I don't always ...