"Concrete Angel"

by Scott Zambelli

The original concept I came up with for this was inspired by a Martina McBride song...also titled, "Concrete Angel".

The overall concept I have of my "Concrete Angel" is about an angel walking the concrete streets of the manmade world we live in. The main story line behind this is of a guardian angel who fails in her duties to protect a child she was assigned to "guard" because she became overconfident in her abilities to protect her assignments.

In her failure, she seperates herself from heaven and walks the Earth trying to makeup for her failure by doing good things for people. However, in the end, she discovers that she is loved for who she is and that God was able to take her failure and turn it into a bigger good. In her journey to find forgiveness, she discovers that the forgiveness she needed was not from God...since He had already forgiven her...but from herself.

I wanted to create an angel who...because of her circumstances...has given up the traditional "angelic look" and has adopted a very worldly wordrobe during her wanderings. I'm hoping to eventually make this into a story and have a series of artwork that will go along with the book.  In the artwork, the angel will appear with a wide variety of clothing for different seasons of her life, as well as the seasons of the environments she's in.

The final artwork I created was inspired by a photo of Peggy Vreeland by photographer Duke Morse.