fire inside (version one, two, and three)
version one
in the summer of 2024, i made this painting one day just for me. i didn’t spend a lot of time on it and i didn’t have a plan. i just started painting, adding one part at a time and a felt like i was led by the fire inside, which turned out to represent a feminist perspective. it felt a bit personal, so i held onto it.
version two
in december 2024, after discovering a song with a lyric that said “never seen a fire, like the one inside her, even when she’s tired, she could melt sierra snow, and make the golden rod grow” i felt like the song just went with the painting; both gave me the same feeling.
so i bought handwritten lyrics of the song from the artist and by the end of january the following year, i put the lyrics in a frame juxtaposed next to the canvas. moving without a plan like the first version with some sort of reckless abandon (like ripping the canvas off the original wood frame), i updated the original painting a bit and fixed some parts i didn’t love and wanted the new version to feel a bit more…powerful.
at that time i was exhausted, burnt out, had just been laid off for the third time since 2020… but still i felt ready for whatever. ready to (melt the canadian snow and) grow.
song is broken bow by john calvin abney
version three (and what i think is the final version)
in april 2025, i had just bought this small (about 11x14 in) wood frame from a thrift store and wasn’t sure what to do with it, but it felt like a good piece for a collage. the original canvas of it was some kind of paper glued flatly onto the frame (like something you’d find mass produced and at Home Sense or Target or something).
i noticed then that version two had less meaning than it did when i first made it—i still love the song but the art was ready for something new. so i took version two apart, found a new frame for the handwritten lyrics on their own, and started cutting up the canvas art just enough so that it fit onto this wood frame. i wasn’t concerned if it looked cut up and pieced together. that was the intention. i wanted it to look like some sort of process and rough mess because that’s what the fire inside usually looks like. i glued it down and then started adding things to the canvas in a similar way as i did in version one and with a reckless abandon like i did in version two—completely led by the fire inside.
i added cut outs of words from a random comic ‘zine i recently found in someone’s free mini library in their yard that ‘fit the story i wanted to tell,’ i added cut outs of flowers from construction paper that were the same shape as some ceramic necklaces i just made, added some more touches in paint, paint pen, oil pastels, pencil crayons, etc… and really just kept adding random things until i felt like version three could hold its own and tell a new story.
