Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.
-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
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I think the lines above spoken by Lewis Carroll’s Alice fit this new painting very well. In the book, she has has just grown to a very great size and frightened away the White Rabbit which has her suddenly realizing that Wonderland is a very puzzling place. But even more puzzling is how the changing perspectives of herself she encounters in Wonderland have left her questioning her own identity, her own sense of self. The solution to navigating her way through Wonderland is in finding out her own identity.
And that is a truth for almost anybody, anywhere.
And that’s what I see is this painting, a 30″ by 30″ canvas that I call Breakthrough.
The foreground with the cryptic forms of its fields sets the tone for piece with darker tones and tempting colors. The path runs through these labyrinth-like segments toward a sky that has a burst of light from the sun pushing forward, symbolizing the breakthrough alluded to in the title. And at the furthest inward point is the Red Tree. Like Alice, it is attempting to shed the many differing perspectives of itself it has run across to get to this moment, a moment in which it feels it has reached a solution to the puzzle of who or what in the world it truly is.
The path forward is much easier to travel once you have solved that great puzzle, as Alice called it.
This painting is part of my annual solo show, this year titled Native Voice, at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria VA which opens on June 5, 2015.
Redtree Times 