This new piece, a 16″ by 16″ image on paper, has been a long time in the making. I started it when we got back from California at the beginning of December and have went at it in dribs and drabs over the last several weeks, finally putting on what I feel are the last touches yesterday. It’s an odd piece for me, darker in theme and feel, but one that makes me want to continue looking at it.
The idea came from the trip, from someone I met at the Just Looking Gallery. He has some of my work and told me that he had an idea for what he thought would make an interesting painting for me. I usually don’t get much inner response to those type of solicitations but I immediately had an image in mind as he described a simple clearing where a path comes to an end. It was an intriguing concept that was a new variation on the path that often winds through my paintings .
Does that path ever come to an end? What if it did end? How would that place look and feel? All of these thoughts ran through my mind in a flash. It was such an existential question with great symbolic potential. The idea and the image ran through my mind for the rest of the trip.
This is the first incarnation of that thought. I used the Red Chair as the central character here. I felt that there needed to be a character of some sort in this space and didn’t want it to be a figure. The chair also creates a new set of questions. Why was it there? Who put it there and who sits in it? As the path in this piece comes to its conclusion , the wider clearing at its end gives it the appearance of an old keyhole. Perhaps this is a symbol for the unlocking of some barrier behind which lay the answers to our greatest questions or to some grand mystery?
It’s a piece that keeps asking questions and I don’t know if it will ever yield answers. But it makes me want to keep looking. and perhaps that is its purpose here.
I don’t know– it’s a mystery to me as well.
Redtree Times 