Brisa Amir

What is your recipe to adapt to the new normal?

Loved ones share recipes all the time, and have been doing so for a long time. 

My process moves like history: overlapping sheets to cover the past and expose what’s been forgotten. 

I study the self like mapping a recipe to pass down through generations; a vessel of continuity that my choices can spice up or sweeten. 

From collages once-cherished,  I created a narrative of two individuals only successful when separated. 

The portrait Passages From The leftovers I is contoured by a single rip, lightning across a mountain with a painted lone star. His aura is orange and red, like fire or pain, but dashed with joy and freedom. 

Passages From The Leftovers II is a self-portrait, a purple aura, with splashes of rain bruises, patches of green and a sweep of teal — cornered by rock formations ripped from a magazine, while scribbles in graphite suggest flight patterns of birds. At the center is an orange sunset, ripped from the heart of paper, also forming a mountain.

Almost five years pass five works, as the Silver wings of morning, shining on the gray day, crash with comets into the ivy tree of Van Gogh’s asylum ‘Starry Night’. While water drips into butterfly tears, slippers stamp onto sour, fire-green sheets. 

A woman’s intuition provides temporary relief in blue and green, while the purple leaves show up naked ecstasy. Lemons hurt the eyes. Black stars shush them. 

But What is there to say is like a window, a mini curtain in a moonbath with music lines minus the notes. They make silence in the blurred warmth of a fire, while I walk a little faster holds on a hanger for clothes and the fabric of a footstep. An inverted leaf adds a microbial touch, static, stagnant, marked by fresh rust. 

Ergo woe her Ancient Heart, the charms of a new flame hide the same hurt.

In the lockdown, the world at large began to feel depression and anxiety more sharply. 

I suggest a recipe for medication: observing emotions. 

These visits in colored auras, transforming into textures that absorb the environment and traces of other people. Mark-making is virulent.

Painting through rips,  I strive to master the world within. 

While doing so,  I realize the most terrifying people are ourselves. 

These recipes, like paper, overlap, and expose, unfolding the past and the forgotten. The subtle bodies breathe with color and pulsate luminosity. To look forward,  there is a need to look back.