This week’s blog posts are all by Erin Keane. The past three weeks have seen Crystal Neubauer, Amanda Jolley and starting us off was Michelle Belto introducing our collaborative series; this week Erin! Enjoy and savor the uniqueness of each~

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Have you ever played the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”? The challenge is to connect any actor with Kevin Bacon, through six steps or less, based on common Hollywood film roles. The game was created in response to a comment made by Kevin himself, in his prolific film days, that he’d worked with everyone in Hollywood – or worked with someone who’s worked with them. The game was based on the theory “Six Degrees of Separation” that posits every person is connected to every other person in six steps or less (“a friend of a friend of a friend”). Our expanding world is increasingly connected by advances in communications and travel; our friendship networks grow larger and span greater distances.

I saw these connections appear at EncaustiCamp last year, where I arrived knowing almost nobody, but soon met new friends that shared much in common with me. The first morning I had breakfast with two people who’d both lived on Hopewell Road, the (small) street in suburban Cincinnati where I grew up. It’s a small world after all!

With the theme for our collaborative art show being “Seven Degrees of Connection,” I set out to visually connect my individual panels together and metaphorically connect my imagery to the world around me.

My first step was to take my camera for photo dates, capturing the colors and textures of daily life. I look for abstraction within ordinary objects, and lately I’m especially interested in the elasticity of light as it dances around shadow and reflection. During a special day out, I noticed these colorful shadows through a red umbrella. I fell in love and filled my camera.

Fortuitously, these photographs were similar in hue to my red paint chip. I say fortuitously because it’s remarkably challenging to find photographs to match the hues of paint chips! At least, it was challenging for me, because I have a certain vision in my mind and didn’t want to settle for bland or overly obvious shots (such as the solid yellow wall that I almost settled for, hah!). Over the months I filled my camera with hues to match my seven paint chips, and tomorrow’s post will show how the imagery developed.