"Katrina Blues" detail view and statement
by Susan Shie Contact me
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"Katrina Blues" full view. 2005. 45"h x 75.5"w.
Begun Aug 19, 2005. Finished Sept 11, 2005. #301
Whole cloth painting on fabric. Airpen line drawing. Fabric paint hand brush painted on, then airpen diary writing on top of colors. Machine crazy grid quilted. One row of hand sewing inside edge of border. One Green Temple Buddha Boy bead.
This piece was supposed to be about me being Eva's nanny. I was calling it Panny Nanny Blues. I am Panny, like my mom was to Gretchen. All the images in this piece are about the three homes I rotate between: our home in Wooster, my tiny studio in Lakewood, and Gretchen, Mike, and Eva's home in Lakewood. And it's about my friends. I made it mostly blue, because it's for a show my WAGE group is having in Feb-March, 2006, called "The Blues." Theme show, like usual. Anything that has to do with the blues is fine for this show, so I was planning this Nanny Blues thing.
Then Katrina struck, just as I was getting ready to write my diary all over the painting. She had already hit Florida, and was expected to hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Then she DID hit, and then she came up here to rain herself out, blowing pretty hard, but not doing very much damage. (Our Katrina damage was leaks in our bathroom ceiling. That's all.)
As I wrote about my nanny adventures the first day, my mind was on the news about Katrina, how the levees had broken, and how New Orleans was now flooding, after Katrina had passed how the rest of the Gulf was really destroyed, too. I would start a thought about nannying and end the paragraph about Katrina. Pretty soon the piece was a wild mixture of nanny adventures and Katrina worries and anger over the totally inexcusable late response by government agencies to the needs of the storm victims. And the heroic efforts of thousands of volunteers from all over.
We all watched as much TV as we could, glued to CNN or whatever station, or the car radio. Each day we thought that surely the next day, things would improve. Each day was worse, more people in trouble, more anger and feelings of powerlessness. "Panny Nanny Blues" turned into "Katrina Blues" pretty fast, and that's what she is. I wrote to pray, to send money, to remember, so that this never can happen again.
I've got a timeline of the storm that I printed off of Associated Press. My friend Charlotte Porter lives in NO and is the AP bureau chief there. Elizabeth says Charlotte got out. I hope so.
Randy Newman's song goes through this quilt and through my mind, over and over Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline. They're tryin' to wash us away, they're tryin' to wash us away"
Bring the troops all home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and let the ones who've done more time there than they were supposed to, let them go home. Let the ones who have normal hitch time left go down South and help rebuild such a huge part of our nation. Let us leave the rest of the world in peace for a while.
Let us all pray.
Susan Shie 9-5-05, Day 7 of Katrina.
Note February 14, 2006: They still haven't done anything. Why????? Why are we letting them do nothing?
Turtle Moon Studios: Outsider Art
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Susan Shie and James Acord
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