When She was Young

When She was Young

28"x 34"
acrylic/fluted sbs

This somewhat staying with the "mother" theme.....
When we were kids, our grandparents,aunt, and dad would tell us stories about our mom,  about how she was just like the boys, and in many cases braver and more fearless.

 She would go swimming  in the river full of eels, crabs, fish ....and god only knows what else!
Fish on the dock, cut her own bait and clean her own fish!
She was on the swim team and would frequently beat the boys at their own game,  I can attest to the humiliation of losing to her in ping-pong matches and other games of skill.

So I felt that this painting best represents her in a single frame.... what other gal would pick up two writhing snakes at the same time?

I'm not getting mushy, I just felt it was a nice tribute... Hi Mom

by the red door

i think my most memorable dreams from the last ten years are those with my mother in them.  she died in 2000.  the encounters i have with her have never been negative. she always seems to be in a place of peace. although she never beckons me to join her, most of the time in my dreams she does watch from afar from a place that is very nebulous and unrecognizable yet somehow strangely peaceful. the painting above is based on such a dream.  when i awoke from it i was filled with sense of well being and understanding. 

The Beauty of War

The Beauty of War

28"x18"
acrylic/canvas

I have a habit of turning off the sound during the television commercials.....  It always seems to annoy, I don't watch all that much, but when I do, I seem to watch PBS.

I was watching with the sound off and during one of the breaks......

And the program was going in slow motion showing a bombing run during the Vietnam war.

It was very elegant....and eye catching, the bombs would slowly release from the plane and drift downward in a weightless slow silence, almost like it was an everyday occurrence without care or reason......
I'm not sure what was being said during the trailer.

Then the bombs would hit the ground, and the reason was evident, fireball, flying debris, smoke and much destruction, it almost seemed like the sound came on..... it was visual sound, and loud as any other.

Still Here....
From the Last Time I was Here

34"x 28"
acrylic/fluted sbs

This is my first post of this project....
The project was conceived 3 or 4 months ago.... the concept of the project is to document dreams or visions sleeping or awake,  I very rarely remember any of my dreams, but I have a acute sense of what is happening around me...

So most of my submissions will be of what I perceive and conceive of my surrounding....
I tend to pick up on things that may go unnoticed.

This painting is in reference to a e-mail I received from Laura while we were hashing through the outlines for the project;  part of the letter was her describing a book she had read it had a philosophical rule that went like this: 

This concept states that if you view eternity as endlessness and not as a linear, unending narrative then experiencing only the present is eternity.

I hope she doesn't mind me c/p part of the e-mail.

holding the moon in your arms

my sleeping dreams are usually very vivid and i remember most of them.  this painting attempts to capture a very compelling one i had on the night of the lunar eclipse that occurred on the winter solstice of 2010.  i had the dream after i went back to sleep-post eclipse.  it was very dark in the dream and i was trying to discover the reason for the darkness.  i found out then that a person had taken the moon out of the sky and was holding it on their shoulder.  keeping all the glowing light to itself.  the person was neither man nor woman yet i knew who it was.  which is very strange and enchanting! the overlap between waking reality and the minds processing of events into sleeping dreams is so interesting to me and i think about this crossover often. what does it mean?

collaboration

welcome.  this blog is to be a place to share a collaboration between jb krost and laura ferrara that centers around capturing, through painting, writing, or photography, visual images that present themselves in our mind's eye and become too compelling not to record. these images may be from either day dreams or sleeping dreams, or, perhaps just ideas or sensations elicited from the multitudinous forms of creative stimulation inherent in being alive.  it is a work in progress! enjoy.