Color My Portrait
Portraits provide the service of telling stories often when viewing an image, we attempt to identify with them. We look at it looking for association and do the same with music, poetry, dance etcetera. Our lives are built on a series of images, examples and experiences that attempt to complete the portrait. The portrait changes at the most primitive times in our lives, from childhood-adolescent-adult. Foundation in the household mold and structure our first masterpiece. My painting was amber with warmth, red with power and pain, purple with joy, blue with disappointment, mahogany with beauty and I could go on, however, my portrait as an adult is still incomplete. Today I am a woman reflecting on my last two paintings for guidance. Holding on submerged in the canvas hoping to use the right art tools to complete it and careful to choose the proper artists to paint it. See a portrait is not only something permanently stained by family but it’s also stained by people that have played a role in your life in any way.
Men Always Leave my one act stage play came to me in my most familiar air and generated itself through my experiences and propelled with the depths of my creativity and the core of my thoughts.
These characters spoke so well to the world for me. Foundation is the beginning of the way we generated our lives in order for things to circulate the way we would like to. At times it functions in ways we would not like it to. There’s so much I wanted to capture but what you should take with you today is the importance of family and the value of children in relationship to their parents. When working in rehearsals it was amazing to see the actor’s gel with the concepts and explore by their limitations in their imaginations to make this family everything it should be and more. The atmosphere was designed for a successful birthing of a performance into an adult portrait.
My portrait began February 26, 1987 and it has yet to expire but to continue developing throughout my existence. My name Naima Yetunde Hammonds, which means God has given the spirit of the mother that returns to earth. My purpose has been in scripted before my comprehension but as a writer, performer, director, producer and dramatist it is my passion and duty to create for the betterment of a vast number of communities and societies; to always thrive off life to materialize masterpieces from this point on. I am grateful in the newest written creation and blessed to be able to share it with you; I introduce to you a loosely autobiographical story in play form Men Always Leave. Sit back and enjoy, learn more about yourself and others. I look forward to conversing about the similarities and differences in our portraits through theater.
Naima Yetunde Hammonds
