Ken had another round of stem cell harvesting on Monday and since then I have been thinking about blood, blood cells, machines and the prisms that are used to process the blood. All of this sturm and drang let to my first Cells painting. This painting is 12″ X 16″ on Kilimanjaro paper. As you can see, I included a couple of new elements this time.
Cells 1
In the past I’ve always used only one diameter for the circles but, in this case, I was thinking about blood cells – white, red, platelets, stem cells – different sizes and colors. I also was focused on the light that I watch each time we go through this harvesting step. Deep down in the machine, the nurses monitor a line of light that is supposed to have a red line running through it. There are times when occurences coincide fortuitously (how’s that for a mouth full!). Last week a friend of mine gave me a stash of art supplies that included artist’s tape which I had never seen or used before. Last week watercoloredhands (may 13, 2011) had a post that described her use of artist’s tape to paint the edges of a building in a piece she is working on. Everything came together and I used the artist’s tape to develop the rays of light. At one point I thought I had “lost it” because the painting looked too dark. After it dried it resembled the colors you see when working with blood and plasma.
Wish us well – tomorrow morning we find out if we got a vaccine from this run!
