Niyah & Amber & Gemstone Recitation

"Niyah & Amber & Gemstone Recitation", oil on canvas, 36x36in. (91.4x91.4 cm). For sale on eBay.

This painting is about amber and a series of related gemstones generated by a search engine algorithm. To select my subject, I did a realtime Twitter search for the word "amber". The results were mostly snapshots of girls and women named Amber. I selected the image and tweet that I liked the best on that day.

I don't know the woman and girl that I painted. I assume that the older person is named Amber, because the tweet (which is included in faint print in the upper left corner of the painting) includes the Twitter username "I_AmBurrrrr". That would mean that the young girl in her lap is named Niyah. The pair are listening to music coming from what appears to be an iPhone, iPod or other MP3 player while they sit on a bed with a polka-dotted sheet. The little girl seems to be holding earbuds to her ears, and the woman must be able to hear the music coming from them as well because she is "chair dancing" with her hands raised and eyes closed. The pair might be mother and child, or they could be aunt and niece, sisters, cousins, or unrelated.

Below the tweet in the upper left is what I've called the gemstone recitation. There are five chemical formulas and one common name for the six gemstones linked to amber by the search algorithm that I used. In order, they are turquoise, peridot, amethyst, citrine, aquamarine, and mother of pearl.