A self portrait?

I've started on my next trade piece with Artist X. The piece I'm responding to was titled 'Pacific Rim,' and here's how my response is starting:



It's a self portrait of sorts (hey, you can't get much more 'Pacific Rim' than me)—it's my mitochondrial HVR I sequence (whatever that means!). It came as a very long string of letters broken up into ten & half lines, using a variable width font which made counting the sequence rather frustrating. I did not realize that some lines were 1 letter short, which made my count 3 off. I had originally thought the number was a rather beautiful 24x24-4, which made the 12"x12" square panel just perfect. But alas, not quite. [And oops, now I see a few mistakes...fix tomorrow.]

In any case, I had this done through the Genographic Project a few years back and found out that my DNA puts me in Haplogroup D, which on their map is shown as the group that comes out of Africa, travels through the Middle East, Central Asia (no wonder I feel such affinities for both), up into Siberia, and then crosses the Bering Strait into the Americas. The map shows the group fanning out across the Americas but it does not show that the group goes south into China/Korea/ Japan at all, although their audio presentation says that they do. See what I mean (I hope I don't get into trouble for using this image):



The piece was very hard to get started—trying to follow this very long string of letters and coloring in the squares to match. The first color was particularly difficult and as you can see, I made lots of mistakes. Here I've already added the 2nd color:



In real life, the first two colors were alizarin red and turquoise and looks much more red, white, and blue than the picture here shows, although that was NOT what I was aiming for. It was a complete accident, but the colors are a bit off in the photo anyhow and doesn't look quite so July Fourth anymore.

It's a long ways from being completed, and I probably won't finish it before I leave for The Dalles for the week. I have some preparations to do tomorrow.

On my July 2 (last Thursday) trip to The Dalles

I went out to visit my senior on Thursday, trying to squeeze in a bit more 'familiarizing' time before I show up for a whole week next week. I took a bunch of the old family photos as well as some more recent photos. I was very surprised that he recalled as little as he did. But maybe he was not having a good day. We'll see how he does next week. He was excited when I told him it was the Fourth of July weekend coming up.