This is a new 12″ by 24″ painting on canvas that, for the moment, I am calling Deliberations. I finished it yesterday and have been looking at it ever since, trying to decipher what it is that I am seeing in it, why it is pulling me in, Something very cryptic in it– perhaps it’s the birds or the Red Chair or the stubbed off tree limbs– that fills me with questions.
What is this place? What do those birds have to do with the Red Chair? Is the sun rising or falling past the horizon and is that snow on the ground? Why is the Red Chair in the circle of earth?
Quite honestly, I don’t know.
Starting with the given title, Deliberations, I begin to see this as a place of judgement, either some sort of self-judgement or a spiritual reckoning. As though it is a place where when one has passed on, they go to review their life to determine what they done with the time given to them here on Earth. The life in question is the Red Chair, the red representing the physical embodiment. The birds might be witnesses or judges or both. The light over the horizon might be the next step forward– heaven, if that is what your belief system tells you it is called– and the trees act as a barrier between this place and that next step.
Kind of reminiscent, in a more symbolic and folky way, of the Albert Brooks/Meryl Streep movie, Defending Your Life, where the dead find themselves at a Disney-like resort where, over several days they attend hearings where they review and defend the life they have lived to to determine whether they have learned its lessons in order to move on to a more ethereal plane. If not, they return to try again.
But maybe this is just a red chair in the woods and those are simply some birds who frequent those woods.
Who knows? It’s all in the eye of the beholder. As for myself, I will deliberate on it a little longer…
Redtree Times 