Watercolor as aesthetic response to trauma

i-4112e7f207f8f1ff452789f71a9fb834-447_Week_23_2.JPG-thumb-400x536-47968.jpeg

Via reader-musician John Danley, I learned of Lori Anne Parker's "Watersketch Prospectus," "a yearlong project and response to a personal health crisis requiring heart surgery." As Danley observes, "her work is related to aesthetic responses to trauma."

After suffering a spontaneous coronary artery dissection, Parker was unable to work with her usual oils, and branched out into watercolor as a medium. Her weekly sketches, each completed in an hour and a half or less, are free-flowing fantasies filled with networks of vines/veins and anatomically inspired botanical imagery. They have a vaguely unsettling effect, don't they?

Corporeal Storm.JPG.jpeg

Top: Unfurling from the Bedrock; bottom: Corporeal Storm, by Lori Anne Parker

More like this

Katie May was a model, and by all accounts a very successful one, having appeared in Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and other magazines and websites. Self-proclaimed the "Queen of Snapchat," she also had nearly two million Instagram followers and was a major social media force, having recently…
Massachusetts is trying to tackle the problem of hospital-acquired ('nosocomial') infections by adding $1 million dollars in funding to track and monitor hospital compliance with infection control measures. As I've discussed before, nosocomial infections are a huge problem, and may account for…
Yes, they can! At least Tim Knowles thinks so: he attaches pens to the ends of branches and lets them doodle in the wind, like botanical spirographs. Knowles says, "Like signatures each drawing reveals the different qualities and characteristics of each tree." It sounds cheesy, but it's true…
The silence must have been deafening. As - hopefully - everybody knows, during 2007 Spencer Lucas and colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were charged with intellectual theft, of pre-empting the writings of colleagues, and of publishing on material without…