It’s Autumn and the weather is wild everywhere. There’s fires and floods and hurricanes and heatwaves, so everyone hold on to your hats!

In this issue, we are exploring themes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.” The Alice tales are kind of kooky and sometimes profound all at once.  Carroll wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. He wrote the sequel, if you will, in 1871. These are two books that - even if you're never read them – are all so familiar.  The tales and characters from Alice are well known by most of us.

In Looking Glass, Alice slips into another world by passing through a mirror. Going through a looking glass has come to mean entering the surreal. However, we are using it here to indicate that maybe you’re looking at the world in a new way.  Featured artists, Cudra Clover and Petrouchka Moise, fit the mold. Clover goes in search of the very small while Moise has had to rebuild her life from a world shattered. Both artists express and experience in very different ways

In This Issue

Papaya Madness, Cudra Clover

Searching for Unseen Life
with Cudra Clover

Cudra Clover – Carey Yashon is her actual name – likes being on the cutting edge. She paints silk but with a decidedly distinctive approach. Silk is a fabric that has lent itself to the decorative arts for both fashions and home furnishings. Many silk artists love to explore the delicate curve of a leaf or the pillowy softness of flower petals.

Cudra derives her sources of inspiration from nature as well.  However, she’s looking a little bit deeper. Well, smaller, actually.  She likes to explore the world at the molecular level or at least at a deeply magnified one.

What piqued her interest in this world? “The beauty attracted me. The weird geometry and craziness of some of these little tiny cells and creatures was just so beautiful. Have you ever looked at a vovox? They’re like little communities of algae that group together in a ball and they dance. There’s beautiful stuff that we don’t see every day.”

But what brought her to the point of even looking? She says, “I just kept looking at smaller and smaller things. In Hawaii, there’s such beautiful stuff here. Looking at the center of flowers. Then I was looking at sea life up close. I started looking with a magnifying glass. Then I started looking at pictures on the Internet. I started going down this crazy rabbit hole where I was looking at things magnified 100,000 times. There’s a whole world in there that people don’t see and they should see it.”

(To read more, go to Vol. 24, Issue No. 3.)

Ezuli-Louizian, Petrouchka Moise

Painting Pathways to Heal The Heart
Petrouchka Moise

 Petrouchka Moise is no shrinking violet or wallflower. In fact, her dance card is well punched. She is a very accomplished woman.  Having lived through Hurricane Katrina, Petrouchka, at that time, worked as a social worker (in addition to running a consulting business) and traveled all over the state of Louisiana. Before Katrina hit, her family was calling her to make sure she was safe while she was busy running around town ensuring that those who needed assistance were getting it. All this while she was in school seeking her Ph.D. – she already had an MBA – at University in Louisiana.

Petrouchka grew up in New York – Brooklyn – to parents who left Haiti in exile but always with the intention of returning home.  Her lineage in Haiti is long and influential. As such, she was initially
never allowed to fully assimilate into American culture.  Her parents wanted her to be ready to jump back into Haitian culture and to return to their island home (she wasn’t allowed to date until
after she turned 18).

Returning to Haiti never happened. Yet Petrouchka has this heritage and culture and, at times, had no place really to fit it in.  After her first visit to Louisiana, she said, it was the first place she felt truly at home.  Louisiana with its mix of many cultures including, African, Caribbean, English, Spanish and French, Petrouchka notes that for the first time she didn’t feel like she belonged to someone else. In New York, she says, “I was always someone’s daughter.”  She felt a sense of homecoming in Louisiana. Her painting on silk, Ezuli-Louizian, with its symbols from both Haitian and French cultures.

(To read more, go to Vol. 24, Issue No. 3.)

Young Patient Painting

Speaking Silk and Colours
Regina Zakrzewska’s

 Regina Zakrzewska is a psychologist by profession, specializing in health and psychotherapy and an artist by passion, specializing in the art of painting on silk.

Regina has lived in many countries including Poland, the country in which she holds citizenship. She lived in Uzbekistan for 8 years, and the Middle East and Qatar where she lived for about 10 years. She now lives in the U.K. since 2016. She has visited many other countries and has presented her artwork in numerous exhibitions.

Regina has painted since childhood, describing herself as a compulsive doodler as a young girl. She would draw on any piece of paper on which she could lay her hands.  She fondly reminisces about the times when she would enjoy drawing for hours sitting next to her father who, being an engineer, had a large desk at home where he would work on his project drawings.

At a later age, she was strongly influenced by the Impressionist Movement of the early 19th Century and the works of its stalwarts: Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

(To read more, go to Vol. 24, Issue No. 3.)