Origin Story

First let me start with a spoiler- Zilphia Blue is a pen name. As I was considering pen names I kept coming back to a character I created for a short story: Zilphia Blue Space Artist.

This character was important to me because she was inspired by a real life artist, and my Grandmother, Zilphia. She painted landscapes using oil paints in the 70’s and 80’s (and beyond). In the early days or her artist career, oil paints were considered a man’s medium and landscapes a man’s topic. Weird right? To think that was even a thing. But, women were not taken seriously in the field unless they were painting still life in water color. Because of this early paintings Zilphia signed her paintings Z. instead of using her full (obviously female indicating) name. She painted all the way up to her passing in the early 2010’s. By then though, the art world had evolved enough that she was signing her paintings Zilphia.

I remember going to local craft fairs with her. The smell of the paintings and the big a-frame peg boards that she used to holder her paintings. In my memory they were taller than her, and I think she probably built them herself. She once told me a story about being at such a fair, when a male art teacher came through with his class. Hidden behind an a-frame (she wasn’t a tall woman), she listened to him describe her paintings to them. He talked all about the bold masculine strokes of the clearly male painter. And couldn’t they all see why oil was clearly a man’s medium. Well she found it amusing and irksome to say the least. And she was anything but a shrinking violet. So she stepped out from behind the peg board to tell him he was wrong. Heaven knows what kind of language she used, because she could curse like a sailor. But she did serve in the Navy during world war II, so she came by it honestly. As the story goes, she made that male art teacher swallow his words and gave that class something new to think about when she revealed she was in fact the artist. Then proved it by taking them to her painting in progress. And in my version of the story she took over the class from there. But that could be my writer’s imagination.

I have other fantastic stories about this amazing woman (like why and how she ended up in the Navy). But those are for another time.

When I was considering pen names, I kept coming back to Zilphia Blue. The character I created for the short story used the color blue in an otherwise gray world. She came to me when I was thinking about my Grandma’s paintings that hang in my house. I have a favorite that has a bright blue river running up the middle. It hangs in my kitchen so it can brighten my day when I get my coffee in the morning.

When it comes to my writing, I am uncharacteristically shy. I needed a bold alter ego who could navigate social media and promote her book confidently. And so I leaned on the legacy that Zilphia left in my heart and the color that, in my mind, sums up her boldness. And as I’m writing this I realized blue is also the color of the throat chakra, the center of communication. No wonder it just felt right.