" Future Vision" - Oil
A self-portrait - done at age 20
"Future Vision" was the first real painting Aliah had done on a big canvas and the only oil painting she has ever done. She was to be painted by an art student who just didn't feel it... so he left the canvas - there with only her hat that he had started to paint on it.
Her roommate - Jamie Erfurdt - an amazing painter - who had her painting studio there. Jamie gave her the inspiration and courage to finish the painting herself. So she sad down and kept painting until it was done. It took 7 hours and knowing exactly when to stop was what the painting taught her. One of the most important skills as an artist, is knowing when to stop.
Jamie became a mentor to Aliah in painting... from just being around this prolific painter who just like Aliah, loved Georgia O Keefe, Vincent van Gogh, and Monet, with beautifully vibrant impressionistic colors and a dreamy quality that Aliah continues to reach for.
Aliah & Jamie shared a flat on the corner of Haight & Ashbury where the corner living room became a hang out place for many deep thinking artists who would come to talk about life and art at their Pot Lucks. Aliah's Piano Teacher Steven Dennis was a regular who would play his classical music effortlessly & accompany Aliah singing modern songs by his teacher and folk songs by Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell. He encouraged her to play her own songs and especially these long meditative improvisations she would do on the piano - as he said Aliah would "color with sound". During the 7 hour painting session doing this self-portrait she was told by the well saught after voice teacher - Judy Davis (who only accepted professional singers) that she had been accepted as her student.
She studied with Judy Davis for 5 years and now teaches this very unique covertone method that Judy had learned by working with Barbra Streisand. She did it naturally but was not consistant with herself, she needed a way to strengthen her voice and so Judy developed these exercises for her, and they helped her and then many other famous singers. All this training was part of Aliah's BA in Humanities from New College Of CA. Aliah's focus was music and Performance Art, Art, and Yoga, and TV production was her vision to bring all her Interdisciplinary arts together. New College of California was an amazing school where the only required class was "Compared To What? This is where we learned peer counseling skills and focused on our short term, long term, and life goals. The short term goal our final. Aliah performed - Songs of Atlantis, to promote OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) from the play she wrote, "Songs Of Atlantis" as her Capstone Project for graduation after mentoring with a SF known playwrite Martin Epstein, who said these words in one of his last interviews.
"That in order TO DO theatre, MAKE PLAY, a rather crazy condition has to be acknowledged. Namely, that a group of people (collaborators), united in the desire of each to singularly display his or her theatrical mastery, come together to perform the passion/destinies of another group of people (the plays' personae) who are essentially dysfunctional, particularly in their relationship to mastery.
One can, of course, recognize potential masters among a play's characters -- Hamlet, Oedipus, Christy Mahon, Chekhov's Nina, Hamm. If the play is tragic, those with even a tinge of mastery will destroy themselves or be destroyed by the malevolence of the collective. If the play is comic, the threat of annihilation by the collective (variations on a theme of stupidity) will be just as ferocious, but mastery will miraculously win out.
If you look at the portrait her hair curls around a crystal ball. Aliah says it is her vision of being an Artist Activist - in service to the world's awakening to love like this "Peace Through Music" collage.
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