A Great Green Global Gathering for Grimmie's Birthday

💚 This graphic is not some sort of peculiar early Saint Patrick's Day motif. It's another small effort to pay tribute to the late Christina Grimmie (March 12, 1994 - June 10, 2016) on the occasion of her 23rd birthday.

These days have seen a remarkable outpouring of love and appreciation for the slain artist and her family and friends from so many different people and places.

As I have often noted in this blog, Christina was a prodigious musical talent with a spectacular voice and a beautiful soul. She was an inspiration to young and old, parents and children, people all over the world.

Why green? It was her favorite color, a fact that she managed to convey through countless references and gestures in her many videos. Green was her favorite for numerous reasons: Green for Grimmie, green for the color of elves, and especially green for the color of "Link," the heroic protagonist in the Legends of Zelda video game series. Since her death, her international band of followers have taken as a specific reference the green heart emoji. 

Link from the Zelda game.

As green is the theme for her truly global (and ongoing) "birthday party" (both online and on the ground in places as far away as the Philippines and Latin America), I decided to stop being such an intellectual fuddy-duddy and use the graphics part of my brain to do something odd and goofy. (Although, let's face it, I'm intellectually pretty odd and goofy too! 😊)

Not that the graphic doesn't have significance: the green background sets off her image in tones of brown and gold and yellow, as if it were a blazing light, a fire -- undefeated but gentle, warm, and above all, luminous.

As a musician and performer, Christina left a legacy both in sound and in image. I think she presented the kind of visual impression that Marshall McLuhan was trying to identify when he coined the term "iconic" specifically with reference to electronic media. But in a way she turned McLuhan's insight on its head: she succeeded in mastering media technology in such a way that she was able to shape it into genuine communication, conveying to it the indelible stamp of her own personality and allowing others to encounter her (in a certain sense) through it. There is perhaps something here at least analogous to the broader and more classical sense of "the iconic."

Christina Grimmie is greatly missed especially on this, her 23rd birthday, but she will never be forgotten, and she is certainly not invisible.