I am excited to send in my entry for this juried show in North Carolina. I have entered the past two years and really enjoyed the process of working through ideas.
I am an abstract painter and painting realistically is not something I truly enjoy or are very good at, funny how that is often the case!
This year, once again, I did attempt to draw myself in order to paint myself but I just wouldn’t want to share any of my efforts.
I did have fun working with ways to explore this years theme though: ‘Stepping out from the mirror’.
I thought about all the things that means to me, stepping out of the shadow of oneself, stepping away from the story other people have build around who you are, stepping out of projected identity within family groups, even pondering how our own self image changes over time.
I thought about how we often don’t see ourselves they way other people see us and considered some of the reasons why this is so. I thought about how we are not who we see in the mirror and how to get past referencing ourselves with what we see reflected back in an image of a body. We can’t see the soul in a mirror although, we can sometimes glimpse it in our eyes.
As this show is open to mixed media and I don’t often play in that arena, I thought I’d send in an abstract entry again, with a twist. Hope you like it.
‘The ties that bind’
Oil on canvas and thread.
2020