The first angel was an accident. Or I could say it just arrived. I was in a dark place, and all I could do was turn to art. I had always put my life on paper, pulling the terrible out of me so I could breathe. I began a painting, Fallen 1, from one of my drawings of broken people/creatures and put mountains in the background. When people came by, they saw an angel: the unfinished mountains in the background had become wings that sprung from the its back. I began to adapt the concept of the fallen angel in other paintings; the angel had been removed from heaven, but perhaps in my version, returning was a possibility.
My poem, only feathers string me across the sky, one nudge or wrinkle and I fall, crash through violet dusk and skyscrapers, this wingless, landlocked, flattened creature of despair, describes the fragile threads/feathers that kept me from falling through the sky at that time. I drew a version of the poem, and what appeared shortly after on my canvas was an angel that hovered above the city, pulled upward by her wings. People saw in her what they needed to: a guardian angel, an angel of hope or an angel of sorrow. That painting is Angel Over the City.
All paintings were painted by me and photographed by me on a Nikon 3200.