2015
The painting entitled Fleeting, began with a picture that I took at a family get together/family function. It’s from the point of view of myself sitting on a couch. In the painting you are presented with a faintly reminiscent figure leaning over and petting a dog at the left hand side of the painting, both figure and dog have there backs towards the viewer. On the bottom right hand side you have what appears to be the pant legs of an individual who has been cropped out of the frame of the painting, along with a red walking cane. The cropping of the individual came about due to the recent passing of the individual in which I felt it would have been a morbid gesture to include the sleeping figure. But in a sense that cropping out, along with strong contrasting brown hues, has made the bottom right hand corner of the painting a more focal area and intensifies a disconnect with the figure and dog. The red cane that runs alongside the bottom of the painting becomes somewhat a symbolic gesture of old age and of the mortality of human nature. This fleeting mortality is reinforced metaphorically in the figure in blue through the use of subtle layers of paint that cover and conceal the figures being and thus fades the figure into an obscurity. Fleeting is life and human kind’s mortality is something that both scares me and comforts me in a strange and bittersweet way.