Heaven and Hell

Feeble Minded Children

Dani Toscano

Heaven is a place that exemplifies beauty. When I picture it, Heaven is a place full of natural shapes and beautiful colors and prints. The natural shapes I used were a plant, a tree, a tree trunk, seahorses, and flowers. I find that all of these shapes exemplify a beautiful image of peace, which is my version of Heaven. Sometimes I wonder about Hell, but personally I feel that it is more of a concept and a product of fear marketed by those who feel the need to oppress others. I grew up in a Catholic school and they always used to tell me that those who weren’t married with children would go to Hell. I would ask, “Well, will my mom go to Hell?” and they never had an answer. So, in turn, I came to believe that Hell isn’t real, it’s just an idea to scare others into following the “right” beliefs. And if there was this so called Hell, maybe we were living in it now.

To create these pieces, I used images and vectored them. I inverted the colors so black was the background and the vector was white. I printed these on transparency paper, and then placed them over images of graffiti. I took the images of graffiti and photoshopped them to change the color balance into blues, and magentas.  In my opinion, these colors were more serene and to enhance the "peaceful" idea of heaven, I felt these colors were perfect. To create a more visually appealing and layered piece, I added some ripped out pages of old books in the pieces.

As for this project, I had a lot of fun seeing others’ perspectives of Heaven and Hell. I actually got a lot of inspiration from one piece when we were drafting our beginning pieces.

Plant

Tree

Tree trunk

Seahorses

Flowers