A friendship frozen in memory,
Drowned by resinous trauma,
Fossilized to golden crystal,
Agelessly preserved,
A yellowed relic of the past.
If only I could strip away
The ossified layers,
The friend within might
Re-emerge, hale and whole,
Ready to renew our time together.
© 2025 Edward P. Morgan III
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In a way, this piece is a continuation of Old Friends from two years ago. It caught me that over time, we tend to remember the people we’ve lost touch with and think about them as not having changed since the last time we saw them, whether that is two or twenty years ago. Like they’ve been preserved in amber. In reality, they’ve changed like we’ve changed during the intervening time, both physically and psychologically, through experience. So that thought of “if only” becomes more of a dream or a fantasy.
And yet, I still think about some of those old friends and wonder.
To create this image I started with pictures found online of insects trapped in amber. One seemed to show a near perfect winged critter in a polished slice of amber. (I have my doubts as to whether that was a real insect in real amber, but I digress.) Another showed a polished stone with the amber fractured and bubbled. I started by making a panel of colors similar to those of Baltic Amber. Oranges and yellows, with some red. I then created a shape and mapped the panel into it. Next I created my insect, then distressed it. Bugs in amber are rarely perfectly preserved. I added bubbles and cracks around the insect, trying to get the whole to look like the many examples of amber I’ve seen and had. Then added a background and shadows, both in the amber and below it, to give it a more 3 dimensional look.
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