Zoe Bird

Can you tell us about your early encounter with art and how it shaped your creative path?

When I was about 5 years old, an older girl named Pearly Mae was drawing on a piece of paper, and I wanted to know how she did it. After she showed me, I started drawing. My first drawing at school was an impressive map of America.

You mentioned that art has been a way to escape what does this “escape” mean to you today?

The “escape,” means away from stress. It helps me to escape the pressure of this life, a world away from all the noise, it quiets your mind from the news, social media, and even family issues. I’m in a world of relaxation and creativity.

Your Geisha painting is based on an original piece.How do you approach transforming someone else’s work into your own artistic vision?

My sister-in-law who gave me the frame with the Trellis and quotes inside of it wonder if I could use this. I wasn’t really like it at first until I took it out of the frame. It almost looked like the Trellis had been transformed on the cardboard, and the quotes were a transformed as well, still this the artist name was on it. I took her original Skelton of the Trellis and made them my own by painting flowers on it, and made some of the leaves bigger. The vines were already perfect on the canvas, it needed something more. I painted over the quotes, still thinking what will I do with this. I thought about Painting a 19th Century woman which would have been fitting in a garden as I kept pondering about it, I came up with the idea of a Geisha girl.

What inspired you to focus on the Geisha figure, what does she represent personally?

When I thought about the Geisha it took me back to the movie Shogun, Crouching Tiger-The Geisha and Madam. I like the way they look and the Kyoto they wear, looking like comfort robes. I guess in a small way of three of my Asia Acquaintance are of Chinese descend and each year I’m invited to the Chinese New Year. I do recognize colors and beauty of it, and not a part of the Chinese culture. Japanese culture tea, music, dance serving in Kyoto, and the Geisha is written with Chines characters. The profession originated in Japan. I didn’t know this. I learned to separate the connecting of medieval terms and concentrate on the traditional Japanese culture, embodying elegance, discipline and refined artistic skill.

You kept the original artist’s name alongside your-own what is your perspective or authorship and artistic reinterpretation?

I saw the artist as an artist who wanted to create something, but maybe had conflicting thought on what to do with those lovely trellis, and decided to put an inspiration quote instead of a picture and frame it, so I enhance what I thought she was thinking of what she could have done there, and made her dream of the trellis come alive in a garden with a beauty woman enjoying it. I allowed myself to supersede her vision and finishing the art piece. My creation of a lovely garden filled with peace and harmony with a beauty geisha girl. I left traces of the artist behind with or Skelton trellis, and her name as the original artist of the trellis; by painting flowers on the trellis, and greenery behind the girl, which hides the beautiful quotes had written.

What do you hope viewers feel or reflect on when they see your work?

I hope they will see a world that the astronaut saw as they went to the dark side of the moon in awes. A sense of people, a beautiful spiritual creation that man did not create, and it goes beyond our understanding. We all live on this one planet, we all are connected even we think we are not, we all are a part of this big beautiful creation-one world. We all want Peace. We all want to be love. The commonality we share is that we all are human.