The model for this work is the beautiful daughter of a wonderful friend. The long story, short, is that I planned to create a work featuring foods and the people of the southern Atlantic coastal Gullah Geechee culture. I had an idea and... I’m forever grateful for the opportunity to illustrate a direct descendant of this amazing culture. 🖤 Thank you both SO much for this honor. 💓💓
I created a stamp from floral foam for the background. The background peeks out of the cutouts, as her own background peeks through the person she is today.
Rice is an important part of this story, and why I chose the dish Red Rice instead of something more photogenic and more familiar to most people. (Plus it’s SO delicious.) Many of the Gullah Geechee people were taken from West African rice growing areas and then enslaved on southern Atlantic coastal rice plantations. Red Rice is actually very similar to a West African dish called Jollof Rice, and is why I illustrated it in a dome-like shape. Like two of the others in the series, there is a star-shaped okra slice.
The sky blue stripe at the top is the Haint Blue protection against evil spirits. It was the Gullah Geechee belief that porch ceilings painted in this blue would trick the spirits into thinking it was the sky.