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Raye Draws
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The Liminal

A painting by artist Lauren Raye Snow called “Home.” A female presenting figure in the foreground, ambiguously young, with an olive complexion, orange-red lips, flushed cheeks bordering on burning, dark hair in braids, dark brown eyes, and a slender build, wearing a black satin fantastical confection of a dress, like a nun turned into a gothic cupcake. In the background a giant thunderhead looms heavy and foreboding in the turquoise-blue sky, itself bright and unnaturally orange. Flanking the woman in the background are two live oaks barren of leaves, and the ground is green but singeing a yellow-brown from the extreme weather. The woman clutches an armadillo, like a precious relic, or as Mary to a baby Jesus; her face is ambivalent, tense, afraid, sad. She is crowned with the blown out wildflowers native to Texas.

Home

The Gate (Anima Sola IV)

A femme bodied person, illuminated by blue, pink, and gold light, wears steel plate armor and stands facing front, eyes gently closed and head slightly turned into their own hand, which is caressing their face. They have medium brown skin and black hair, and entwined in the fingers of their hands are devotional beads. Around their head is a circular halo, upon which is written “I am the angel and there is no other.” Within the halo there are many lush flowers, and these flowers surround and caress the head of Joan. There is prismatic light suffusing the scene with a background of subtle indigo, and small, graceful, glowing motes of dust, or stars, or glittering orbs of violet and golden and chartreuse light, surrounding the figure.

The Ecstasy of St. Joan

A femme figure appears as if lit from below by firelight; she stands in front of a solitary mountain, its single peak backlit by the setting sun, or the first rays of dawn - in this liminal space, it is hard to tell. The figure has cropped dark hair, a pale olive complexion, and she raises her right hand, palm open, which has a bright red-pink blistering burn wound. Her left hand gently grasps her right wrist, and her left pointer finger rests in the center of her right palm. She wears a classical white robe, her shoulders bare. On either side of her, serpentine chains dance on their own accord. The terminal link of each chain has been broken. On the mountain, in the distance, eight iridescent lights scale up the peak. Stars dimly twinkle in the liminal sky above.

Purgatorio (Anima Sola II)

Two figures in profile: A young girl of middle eastern descent, hair plaited in two black braids, in overalls, stands in front of a white female astronaut in her 60s, dressed in a spacesuit. Stars and nebulas swirl beside them and throughout the girl's hair. The spacescape above fades to black.

The Lady Astronaut of Mars

Strange Agony

A glowing milky-pink cocoon hovers on a background of midnight blue. Out of the cocoon emerges the head of a girl, with white blond hair that tumbles gently over the cocoon and blue eyes. She looks pale-sick with an element of quiet, dreamy shock, her dark lips softly parted. A white Apollo butterfly lands on her cocoon, the crimson dots of its wings hovering over her neck, which is faintly visible from through the cocoon's weird, skinlike membrane. Glowing veins pulse at the cocoon's base, and a shocking pink light illuminates the cocoon's opening.

Becoming

A woman kneels amid a misty, liminal space, her hands open and empty on her lap, blackness behind her. She stares abjectly into the middle-distance, off canvas and toward the right, her eyebrows just barely knitting together. She has pale skin and auburn hair, which is on fire, burning hot and bright - an inferno. The light and shadow from the fire throws her body and the surrounding atmosphere into an eerie red-orange light. Three shadowy hands reach up through the mists below her. Orange sparks whip around her in a vortex of wind, blowing the fire up and towards the right. Cool reflections linger in the shadows, in between darkness and redness. On the left, her body and the mists below her are shadowed in a numinous red, while on the right, the dim, sickly blue of the mists twirl. She is empty, both frozen and inflamed, fire burning from nothing, paralyzed in the in-between.

Inferno (Anima Sola III)

Colleen by Lauren Raye Snow

Colleen

Anima Sola I

a young Mexican woman pointing to her heart, which is exploding out with lightning

Finding

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