Bone Song

The item I chose at the museum was a painting by Sandy Gillespie entitled Bone Song.
It is located on the upper level in the Rose Berry Alaska Art Gallery portion of the museum. It was painted using acrylic paint on a canvas and was made in 2007.

I was drawn to the painting by the busyness of the words. They were words that overlapped each other and I stood there trying to make them all out, but I couldn’t. Not even a quarter of the words. I wanted to know what the words said. Were they random words? Were they part of the lyrics to the Bone Song? This confusion kept me coming back to the same painting numerous times.

I felt lost trying to read the words. I wanted to understand, but the longer I looked, the more confused I was. That didn’t stop me. I was adamant on trying to read the painting.
I don’t like being confused or lost, especially about life. Then I started relating this painting to our lives and how confusing it can be at times. There are times in our lives that leave us confused or lost. It can be from knowing what’s right and wrong to life itself.

As little kids, we see the world in black and white. It’s so clear. This is right and this is wrong; this is good and this is bad. But as we grow up, the rights and wrongs of the world overlap and mesh together. Most of our blacks and whites come together and become shades of gray. Instead of seeing the world clearly, we are left with confusion and the task to find what is right and wrong for us. We are still able to find some of the blacks and whites but everything else is a mess of the two colors.

Life tends to unexpectedly change from underneath us. When the change is bad, we feel lost. We ask why this has happened to us? It feels like life has taken its paintbrush and scribbled white writings to our perfectly understandable canvas. We don’t understand nor know why this has happened to us, but we don’t stop living. We try to live with it and keep going. We don’t give up.

There are times in our lives when we have felt lost, confused, and didn’t know what to do. We try to understand what is going on and we end up more confused than ever, but that doesn’t stop us. We keep trying until we feel a sense of understanding, even if that means only understanding parts of it.

 

http://www.rasmuson.org/ArtOnDisplay/Popup_DisplayArt/display.php?artwork_id=309&height=725px