give the murdered girl some space

.














someone in oakland is using nancy spungen's last name as their tag and i absolutely love that. whoever you are, keep going! i want to follow your lead! i want to write the names of murdered girls everywhere. i want to keep their names alive and in front of all our eyes. maybe we could all do this? let's all buy paint pens on payday.

*

sweet as anything





-the panic first welled up in a train tunnel. i drew a heart-shape on my hand and didn't look at anyone-


when we were little, mama gave us the carrot shaver and we peeled the paper off our crayons in soft, undamaged lengths. we set our nimble papers on the table. we took the naked wax outside.

the curls of their bodies dropped in ribbons, fell sweet as snow as children on a sheet of wax paper held down by our feet. we shaved them down until their thinness made them snap.



-i saw the photograph of her ligature by accident-


-in the photograph, there were bruises everywhere-



periwinkle was my favorite then. burned down to dust-wax clumps on my fingers and dolls. i learned to save it for last. the pointed edge. wished upon waited upon. a star, still possessed of its steeple.



-the skin of her neck, an odd tin blue-



mama laid another sheet of wax paper on top and carried off our anthills to the ironing board.

the iron was ready. you could smell it.

she pressed our curls flat
mottled bleeding blobs, orange flooding green, red
stretching across everything.



-red, stretching across everything-



we couldn't touch them right away. my excitement stippled my pink. burns all over baby fingers. eager as anything.

our curls, ironed out, the wax went hard. we cut out heart shapes. one for you and one for me. these are our pretty things. and mama got out the string.

we put them in the window. mama said kaleidoscope. the shadows centered on our beds. heart shapes scurried from wall to wall to forehead. we held out our hands and grabbed the shadows like butterflies.



-the coroner's report said there was a heart-shape drawn in red ink on the palm of her little hand. she had put it there herself. right in the middle of her left-






-boxes of periwinkle shoved under the bed-







.

3 days

that's how long.

this is the quickest an oil painting has come to me in a very very VERY long time.



Alpha
42" x 35"
oil on canvas
angela simione, 2010
N.F.S.

for now, she rests safely in my private collection. this will not be the last time i render her likeness. not nearly. and so i must keep her and tend to her shadows. an angel on my living room wall. secure. whispering. loved.

round 3...

Alpha (study #3)
30" x 22"
mixed media on paper
angela simione, 2009

she looks younger in this piece... closer to her age in the photograph i think, but i'm not sure the addition of color is something she likes.

i'll listen harder.

wow...

oh man! yesterday was quite a day! i drew and drew and drew and 7 hours later, elsie was done with me. so i grabbed my camera and went outside to take a picture in the good light and, of course, the battery was dead. by the time it was done charging, there was enough light left in the evening to snap one good picture and get it posted here... but no. the camera is bugged out and keeps shutting down. my GOOD camera. it may have something to do with the coke that exploded in my bag when my camera was in there too. hmmmmm. so this morning, first thing after the coffee was brewed, i tracked down my old camera and took elsie outside in the crisp, clear morning and took her picture.

i really can't stop looking at her.

she wouldn't stop talking yesterday. oh! such a gorgeous child! and so haunted, so delicate, so full of things i don't quite understand. it's going to take quite a bit of studying to prepare for her final portrait. an oil painting. who knows... maybe she doesn't even need or want that... maybe the roughness of paper is what she wants. i don't know. all i know is that i have to keep drawing her.

this is the 2nd study i've done-



Alpha (study #2)
30" x 22"
water soluble graphite and gouache on paper
angela simione, 2009


i went big with this one. 7 years of life-drawing classes taught me that while your learning, use the biggest piece of paper you've got. give yourself room to feel around, sound out the vowels of a form.

i don't use projectors and i don't trace. it isn't that i have a problem with those methods at all, i don't. it's just preference. i want my hand to be as diligent and specific as a camera. that's what i aspire to. a machine at the end of my wrist. but a machine that has embraced chance and flaw and accident.

besides, this work is too personal. a human has to do it, not a device. this work is more about memory than accurate rendering. doing her portraits are an act of remembering... remembering someone we know nothing about. no favorite color, no favorite food, we can't even be sure what color the cape she's wearing in the photograph is. her portrait is a portrait of loss... and getting every single shadow exactly right really isn't the point. it's about listening. it's looking at those strange eyes, light refracted all through them, and trying to see who she might have been...

who she could be now. or is.

sudden, unexpected...

then out from under the bed, she stood up and said, "look at me".

this is elsie.

i've been trying to draw her for months. here and there, only every so often, sketching her shadows.

lost children are hard to draw. their story creeps in to you and stays. stays deep.



Alpha (study)
11" x 7.5"
mixed media on paper
angela simione, 2009


she was Henry Darger's muse. his broken heart.