At 2 months old, Alexa Warren now officially becomes my youngest client. This painting is an addition to the set of three I did for Andy, Fiona and Rafe last Christmas. Now that they have a new addition to their family, of course, a new painting was required.
Alexa is quite the old soul. You can tell by the way she makes constant eye contact with you. “Looking at me for ghosts” I call it as we have deep conversations between our own gazes. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have polarizing sides of her personality already evident. She is an absolute Zen Being one minute, and the next a tormented screeching screaming demanding ball of twisted fury. Then she snaps right back to waxing the world non-dual… or as much as she can see of it from beyond the bars in her crib.
I don’t remember exactly when I decided to paint the Koi fish for her. It just sorta showed up one day. I sketched it out this past summer, but didn’t start painting it until a few weeks ago. I’d painted a set of Koi Fish earlier this year, but I wanted something with more of an African fusion to it (and yes, I am well aware there are no Koi Fish in Africa…but I can’t argue with the Muse. These things just show up, and I’ve learned not to question their origins). Anyway, I wanted something more angled, as if it were carved from a tree… or born of a tree…because technically, it was. In the set of paintings they already have, Andy is a tree, so I took the liberty of focusing on Alexa’s connection to her father.
As with Alexa’s older brother Rafe, I have broken protocol and made an exact twin of her painting. I took the twin of Rafe’s elephant to India and left it with the orphanage I volunteered at in February 2006. I will be taking the twin of Alexa’s painting with me on my upcoming trip to Africa (Ghana) in February 2007, to present to another orphanage where I will be spending the month volunteering.
Since I painted this in December, the usual gauntlet of Xmas movies served as inspiration, most notably, Scrooged (my #1 favourite Richard Donner movie) and Elf. Two essential Xmas movies for everyone’s collection!
