|
|
|
|
Four Depressed Figures
Medium:
Oil and mosaic glass tiles on canvas
Dimensions:
24" w x 36" h
Edge Treatment:
3/4" bars are adorned with smooth, square, glass mosaic tiles in varying shades of ice to indigo blue
Framing:
This piece has a custom edge treatment, and is not framed.
Price:
$4,000
Original available for purchase:
Yes
Available in Giclee:
Yes
|
| |
|
This painting is the darkest of my paintings to date. And of my hundreds of paintings, it is also the one, that evokes the
strongest reaction of any piece of my work: people either really like it or really hate it.
"Four Depressed Figures" was painted in late 1995 when I was living in Dallas, Texas. I was a young student
then, 25 years old and just starting back to Junior College. I was living with, and engaged to marry, a very abusive man.
He was my best friend, and my worst enemy. My tender lover, and my violent abuser. My caretaker, and my destroyer.
For me, this painting is only remaining documentation or momento of my life's darkest time. At the time I created it,
it expressed my total inability to find peace, or a place or position even close to resembling comfort. It expresses my writhing,
restlessness, hopelessness, and despair. It is a window into my private abyss. But the painting was also my saving grace;
an outlet to express my dark, depressed, hopeless state of mind and put these dark feelings somewhere outside of myself.
I was in such a state of depression at the time I began this painting, I could not finish it. I put on canvas what I
was able to muster, then left it abandoned.
Nine years later, while preparing paintings for a show called "In the Mood" (Bean Scene / Gina Jrel Gallery,
May-July 2004) I pulled this unfinished painting out of storage. My intention for the show was to create a different painting
for each mood, and I could not think of anything that better described depression than this painting. I intended to "finish"
it for the show. But the more I looked at it, I felt it WAS finished. That it said everything I could possibly want to express
about that emotion. I freshened the background with a little blue and called it done. So, while the piece was painted in
1995, the completion date is 2004.
Now, almost ten years later, this painting serves for me as a monument to triumph over adversity. My reminder: if I
could make it through this (and I did), I can make it through anything.
|
