It's In the Rain

The Floating City: New Orleans After the Flood
paintings about the world turned upside down and the longing for home

In 2006, I responded to Hurricane Katrina with a series of abstract "flood scapes",' After the Flood. Three years later, I revisit the ninth ward with The Floating City. The impossibility of painting the physical reality of the flood allowed me to focus on the emotional reality of an inexorably altered landscape. My primary goal is to convey the sense of devastation and loss as well as to offer hope for the city of New Orleans.


through June 1st at the Mezzanine Gallery at Arterra
300 Berry at 5th
one block from the ballpark

Arterra is San Francisco's first LEED-certified green high-rise community. The building uses recycled materials and wood harvested from sustainable forests.

erosion 24 x 24 oil 08


reflected 24 x 24 oil 08



Home: GeorgianneFastaia-badfishstudios Fine Art

Floodscapes

Reflected City 24 x24 oil 08

About these paintings:

A square with a triangle atop it is one of the first visual symbols a child draws. These naively rendered houses represent our memory of and longing for home. As the series evolved, these symbols of home became more elongated, abstract, and totemic while "the Flood" itself evolved into a metaphor for displacement. My challenge has been to translate this sense of loss and disembodiment into the language of paint-- texture, composition, and color.

I have given each painting a “history” through a long distressing process: scrubbing, scraping, and wiping away to reveal shadows, faded colors, and echoes or ghosts of underlying imagery. This creates surfaces in which most of the information is buried below layers of paint, visually communicating the concept of impermanence, time passing, erosion.

I use composition deliberately to reinforce a sense of our smallness against the "bigness of nature" by placing most of the information in the bottom of the canvas, dwarfed by the sky. Multiple horizon lines shift the imagery into the center of the picture plain, as if floating, with houses reflected in the sky; a composition designed to dislocate the viewer from his normal frame of reference.

The emotional use of Color plays an important part in creating mood. I use a palette of somber violets, green-grays and translucent layers of milky color to convey the quality of light after a storm, the thick saturated air that I recall growing up along the Connecticut shore.

Disembodied 30 x 30


remains of new orleans 30 x 30 oil 08

ninth ward 24 x 20
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After the storm 20 x 20

Home: Georgianne Fastaia - BadfishStudios Fine Art

Flooded Main street

Flooded Main street 30 x30 oil 2008 (sold)

Flooded Main Street is the transitional painting between the two series. This is a realistic painting in a predominantly abstract body of work, however, it was this haunting image which inspired me to revisit "the Flood" theme. My primary consideration is to convey the feeling of desolation captured in videos such as these. I strive for emotional honesty in my work and rely on an intuitive sense of color and an immediacy of gesture to achieve it.



Home: Georgianne Fastaia - BadfishStudios Fine Art

ORISHAS of the CANDOMBLE

priestess 36 x 36

Oxum orisha of beauty 36 x 36 oil 09
Oxum's dance recalls her bathing in a waterfall, and summoning the forces that control pregnancy and childbirth. The young woman possessed by Oxum dances alongside her mother.

Oxum likes beauty, and devotes her life to it. She is also the goddess of love and fertility, and looks after newborns up to the age of about 4. The city of Salvadore in Brazil is believed to be run by Oxum; it is said its people love the good things in life.



bahia salvador procession fesitival of oxum 36 x 36

Home: Georgianne Fastaia - BadfishStudios Fine Art