Description
‘The Moon Fruit Harvest’ by Calamity Cole
Artist: Calamity Cole
Title: ‘The Moon Fruit Harvest’
Medium: Watercolor, charcoal and white charcoal on hot press watercolor paper
Dimensions: 8″ x 10″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2022
Artwork Will Ship From: USA
About the Artwork:
“The Moon Fruit Harvest takes place in an imagined forest where it is always night. The creatures and flora have adapted by evolving bioluminescent features. I was inspired by creatures of the deep ocean and wanted to see how their adaptation of light would look in another setting such as a deep forest.
Bioluminescent animals evolved a natural glow for a variety of different reasons. Predators use this light as a tool to stun prey, some use it as a type of lure and others use it to better see when hunting. Prey animals use bioluminescence as a distraction to escape attack or to signal their toxicity. Some even use it to warn others that a predator is in the area. When applied to animals in a forest setting with their intricate tricks of survival, I thought the ability to glow would create many interesting artistic opportunities.
This piece tells the story of a girl existing in this world of the night forest. While harvesting Moon Fruit for dinner, she has the bad luck of a chance encounter with a Lightning Wolf, also out looking for his dinner. Hopefully, it will go for the flying fish it was originally after…
This piece was made with layers of watercolor, charcoal and white charcoal on hot press watercolor paper. I achieve a velvety soft texture by layering charcoal on top of watercolor and softly blending and removing spots with a precision eraser.” – Calamity Cole
About the Artist:
Calamity Cole is a Pop-Surrealist artist out of Southern California. She lives and works out of the pine studded mountain town of Crestline in the San Bernardino mountains. Cole battles with the autoimmune disease, rheumatoid arthritis, which occasionally takes the use of her hands away. She is currently, happily in remission.
Her work is deeply inspired by nature and the wonderful and strange creatures that live there, 1950s retro illustration, folklore, monsters and cats. We are invited to see the strange new worlds of her creation through the eyes of the little girls often seen as the protagonist in her work. Although typically frowned upon in art school, she finds narrative art to be the most intriguing and strongly relates to the suggestivism movement. She hopes her art will invoke a longing for forgotten magic and nostalgia for the intangible freedom of childhood.
Cole attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as The Art Institute of San Francisco where she favored oil painting as a medium, later specializing in mixed media. She utilizes a variety of mediums including pyrography, watercolor, charcoal, UV ink, decoupage and gold leaf. She enjoys using unexpected materials to create subtle kinetic details in her artwork such as UV flashlights to expose a hidden layer of invisible ink.
She hopes she will invoke a longing to remember childhood whimsy and beautiful nightmares with her artwork.