Ochre
A Summer Message,
Dear Friends, Ochre. Pronounced OAK-er, the earth-color pigment ranges from dull gold to a burnt, rusty mango. Designer Ian Heflin has been composing several color storyboards from my work, using details from my paintings, my life as an advocate for Help Save the Next Girl, and my passions as a gardener, lover of animals, traveler, and writer.
Approaching the heat of July, today we have chosen to showcase the bright Ochre Storyboard.
July is the month of my birth and the month of my medical mission work in Zambia. This year, Orphan Medical Network International will again be providing ten mobile clinics, traveling with armed guards out into distressed, impoverished rural settings in the Zambian deep bush.
Why leave home to work in Zambia? In an article posted this week on BBC world news, education correspondent Sean Coughlin sites that "Zambia has about 1,600 doctors for a population of 14 million, and two-thirds of these are working in towns and cities, while most of the country's population is in the countryside." In a sentence, that's why we go to work in Zambia.
In the Ochre Storyboard, see the young man silhouetted against a fire. I took that photograph two summers ago at a clinic called George Compound, where, in the Wound Care & Humanitarian Aid station, we had treated snakebites, tropical ulcers, HIV and malaria complications, burns, scabies, fungus, and starvation for ten hours, until darkness fell, when the fire and our headlamps were the only lights by which to pack up our van and trucks.
You'll especially want to follow our upcoming mid-July trip this summer when the Orphan Medical Network International team is thrilled to be joined for the first time by beloved WDBJ Anchor Chris Hurst, who, after his morning television conversation about grief, service, and healing with Gil Harrington--in the light of Morgan Harrington and Alison Parker--has decided to come experience our work in Zambia for himself.
Other images in the Ochre Storyboard include my barrel of tulip bulbs, a yellowed photograph of my mother, Lillian Ward Vance, who died in 1987 three months before my daughter was born, details from my Africa Series paintings, and from my undersea extravaganza, called Honey Flows.
I'll be doing a WVTF/NPR radio interview with Robbie Harris in early July, about the last five years of my art, and its international and social subjects.
Until then, my janevance.com web site has exciting new sections for you to enjoy, including a purchase page and a link to my recent TEDx talk.
In these days, when rape culture and violent egos overwhelm the news and where sex trafficking and runaways--even murders--hit our own hometowns, our own schools; in this month when innocent 13-year-old Nicole Lovell's murder trial begins, please remember that the positive, edifying fire of love and service eventually exposes and decimates evil, and that the raw, earth-palette burnished beauty of Ochre means the promise of iron strength to do the most good and the least damage.
Always.
Jane Lillian Vance