A Digital Arts Djeli Diary - Story Weaving through the Lens

On the last journey back home to Brooklyn from what has become my second home in Nassau, I brought back not music or books or decorative sea items collected for me by my Bahamian-born husband--but an adult recurrence of chicken pox! Had been looking forward to the annual NABS (National Association of Black Storytellers Conference & Festival) for months. In fact, had been circumspect about making my hotel reservations tres early, as those rooms do seem to get snapped up quickly as griots from around the country and some parts of the globe prepare for a trek to that exciting, highly energizing gathering of creative souls.

Uh-oh, no NABS this year, according to the dictates of chicken pox. :( It's a good thing I hadn't bought my airline tickets early, as I hadn't made up my mind whether I would fly or take a scenic train ride to Chicago from New York; perhaps even investing in a sleeper car, something I'd wanted to experience for aeons. So thankfully, there was no penalty to pay for last-minute cancellations. The room in the hotel was transferred to a grateful sister drummer/librarian from upstate New York who had hoped that something would open up for her and her daughter to be able to stay at the conference site.

Despite the disappointment, the universe had something mystical, magical, life-lifting and soul-enervating awaiting me from within the comfortable albeit a tad cluttered confines of my Brooklyn abode--a flight not to Chicago but a "takeoff" from the territory of my inner artistic being into a new realm of creativity--abstract digital art. Abstract digital art using the canvas of nothing more nor less than the HD camera of my new iPhone 6.

I would've been perfectly okay with a humbler version of a cell phone which had served me well for years; however, I desired to do story weaving through a camera lens as well as through my pen, computer keyboard, and slightly Tennessee-tinged New York voice. I wanted, as my spiritual mentor, the great avatar/"father of Yoga"/author, Paramahansa Yogananda, counseled "to create the extraordinary from the ordinary." And so while playing with photographic images on my phone or computer, while wondering what the other storytellers/griots/djelis were doing at the moment at NABS, image after image of entrancing (at least to me!) digital art sprang forth. From Bahamian flowers and Nassau Junkanoo festivities to garden visits with my grandson to colorful aquariums in the dermatologist's office to sacred gifts over the years from beloved sista-friends, all took on new incarnations of colorful life through the abstract iphoneography which now fascinated me and claimed so many hours of time--both night and day.

It's as exciting to share them as it is to daily create them. Don't know how long "the flow will go". It doesn't matter, really. The Master Artist, God, always seems to have some new artistic regions for me to explore. I feel like a soul transparency for the artistic desires of Nature--just like the leaves, the trees, the global ancestry, the sea--all contained within these images that have manifested in this work. Hope you will enjoy as well. Believe you me, (as the Tennessee elders would say) I sure am!