#75: Lagoon Spider

When my dad returned home from Vietnam, he brought with him a black velvet painting that I will always remember. When he and my mom separated and my brother and I would spend the weekend with him at my grandparents' house, I would stare at the painting on the wall as I tried to go to sleep at night. With lights down low and my dad's stereo crooning soft guitar riffs, I would stare at the Vietnamese fishermen and the quiet moon overhead and let it all carry me toward sleep. The aqua blue stereo lights cast a calming glow in the room. And I think it's because of this memorable--seemingly unimportant--moment in time that I love ethereal blues put together with black. As I made this spider and pondered the significance of the colors, my dad's painting was what I thought of first.

Many years ago when I found the black velvet painting among some things my dad was getting rid of, I asked if I could keep the painting. It's the tacky stuff we want to carry with us through life, isn't it? My grandpa's argyle coffee mug that he's had since I was a kid, the conch shell my great grandmother kept in her living room so that we could listen to the ocean when we visited, an ornament of a little boy in a snowsuit that my grandma had on her Christmas tree every year, and a tacky black light painting that I stared at in the darkness of my father's bedroom, which must have been a comfort to me during those infrequent and close moments with him.

Materials: aqua blue and black flat wooden bead, black wooden bead, black and teal bugle beads, black seed beads, teal E beads, rusted wire