Untitled by Rebecca Cohen; June 29, 2019; acrylic on canvas.

This is a triptych (a word I learned a long time ago from a friend who wrote a three-act play about an art heist) that I painted last summer. I’m not sure if it’s a post-apocalyptic Earth or another imaginary world. I didn’t set out to make a science fiction art piece – it just kind of happened. My painting skills are mostly limited to copying existing artwork and painting city skylines (a theme that can be found on my nightstand, a mug that I use as a pencil cup, a Masque & Gown program from last year, and an embroidery piece I made for Grace), so I knew that would be part of it. Red is my favorite color, and also the color of paint I happened to have the most of, so I started by painting a red sky and a silhouetted skyline:

I also love the moon, and I had some fancy metallic paint, so I added a crescent moon (by painting part of the paint cap gold and then using it as a stamp):

But then I decided there was too much empty space at the top of the painting, and in my practice trials of the moon I had made some less solid prints that I thought looked really cool, so I decided this world had two moons, or maybe one moon with a reflection or projection of itself:

It was so much fun to make that I decided to paint two more panels, and I added more gold in the sky. I’m not sure if it’s a comet or a weirdly shaped cluster of stars, but it was super fun to paint and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. Maybe it’s like H. G. Wells’s star, although this world is already somewhat post-apocalyptic: only two windows in the city have lights on (because I wanted to use more gold paint, because I needed something else to tie the panels together, and because there was no way I would paint a whole city’s worth of windows, but also because I couldn’t imagine a whole lot of people still living in this creepy city under the spooky red sky with these kind of ominous moons and whatever that other star/comet thing is). The red and black sky is definitely eerie and unnatural. I’m not sure if it counts as SF, but if it does, I think it’s the red sky that pushes it over.