About Our Cover Art: Mirage 11

By Fareen Butt

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Mirage 11 is an abstracted landscape of the Sea of Alabaster, just beyond the foothills of the San Andreas Mountains, New Mexico. Held as intrinsic to Apache folklore, the site's corresponding legend tells the making of the culture's greatest heroes. According to the Apache, the Giver of Life warned of a coming deluge and directed White Painted Woman to seek protection within a floating abalone shell. After some time, the waters receded and the shell touched land at White Sands. Here, White Painted Woman birthed Son of the Sun and Child of the Water. Her work in the world is to vanquish the presence of negativities; her youth is eternal. This can be perceived in the ever-shifting re-creation of the sands at this location.

The Mirage Series consists of 15 oil paintings, 75 chalk pastel studies, and 15 oil pastel studies. The works are of abstracted landscapes, places revered as sacred by the indigenes of North America. Expressed through "moving" points of color, these works pursue the vital energy embodied in these spaces. The indigenes that had inhabited these spaces left many testaments of sacredness. The signs of their being are scattered all across North America, or Great Turtle Island: serpent mounds, rock paintings, medicine wheels, petroglyphs, inukskuks, totem poles. Beyond this, there is the unseen: legends and folklore of Creation and of the involvement of each place within a spiritual realm.



Fareen Butt is a painter who received her Bachelor's from New School University and currently teaches art at the high school level in the Bronx. Her work has shown in Pakistan, Cameroon, and New York and is currently on view in New York and New Jersey. The theme of her works revolves around color, spirituality, and depicting the ethereal. She has greatly been influenced by artists such as Louise Fishman, Seraut, Monet, Robert Smithson, Richard Poussette-Dart, and Natvar Bhavsar.