This Honey-Sweet Taste of Freedom Honoring Cicely Tyson Number 1

by Aberjhani

Title

This Honey-Sweet Taste of Freedom Honoring Cicely Tyson Number 1

Artist

Aberjhani

Medium

Painting - Fine Art Mixed Media Painting

Description

“I made up my mind that I could not afford the luxury of just being an actress and that I would use my career as my platform…”
--Cicely Tyson from CBS This Morning interview with Gayle King

When actress Cicely Tyson stunned the world with her performances as Rebecca in the movie SOUNDER and then as the 100-plus-year-old Jane Pittman reflecting on her life in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN (adapted from Ernest K. Gaines’ novel, I was a teenager. The city of Savannah, Georgia, where I was growing up had been a major slave port in the previous century and a center of major advances for the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. Being connected so organically to the issues portrayed in Ms. Tyson’s films (including ROOTS in 1977) I felt them deeply and took them personally because they still impacted my experiences of freedom or oppression. Therefore, upon her passing on January 28, 2021, just over a month after she had turned 96 and only a few days before Black History Month in the U.S., I felt that deeply and personally as well. In a lot of ways, her career spanning some 7 decades made her a 1-woman Black Lives Matter Movement.

If you look at photographs of Cicely Tyson in diva glamor-mode off-screen, you will see that she could wear outfits (hats in particular) some might consider boldly unconventional. Her style was her own. That was her way and this artwork is meant to reflect that boldness with its rising waves of blue, green, purple, orange, yellow, black, and different shadowed tints. Viewed one way, you might see distant figures awaiting somebody’s arrival. Viewed another, it hints at additional interpretations suggesting different stages and dimensions of life unfolding over chromatic fields of time and space beyond time and space.

It just so happened I was already working on “This Honey-Sweet Taste of Freedom” and, as I seem to do a lot lately, going with the flow of my creative instincts instead of forcing to the work to bend to my aesthetic will (if I can put it that way) when news of the actress’s death reached me. Although I had already expressed my admiration for the beautiful Ms. Tyson (briefly) in the book “Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind,” I realized this art piece for her. It is presented in tribute to her courage, her creative daring, and her willingness to sacrifice popularity for artistic integrity and ethical purpose. The title is a play on what is possibly her most famous scene from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman when, after a lifetime of enduring different forms of racial discrimination and human hardships, she defies the laws of Jim Crow segregation by walking to a “White Only” fountain and drinking from it in front of White officials gathered there to discourage her.

Aberjhani
https://www.author-poet-aberjhani.info/
Creator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle
Co-Author Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Uploaded

January 31st, 2021

Colors

Embed

Share

Tags