Anything

I’m hopeless, by he way.

When you feel like there is nothing that can diminish what you feel in your heart, your emotions and all the blood racing through you seems to have within it the certainty of what you’ve been telling yourself that whole time. Little do you know, as much as you feel like you’ll die on that hill, you can’t, even if you want to. I was still struggling with this particular lesson while painting this one.

I have the odd problem that I take too long to make a work while processing the emotions that fuel it, so I end up not really feeling it by the time I try to pen it down. When I finally convinced myself to draw this, It had bee rattling in my head for weeks, and ceased to be about the person I was trying to think about and was more about myself and my failure move on. The image is about a kind of betrayal, and the colorful mess is my balance of humors, a kind of expression of how I’d profile my reaction according to those ideas.

I was very much color-averse at this stage in my development, so deploying it was a bit of a chore for me, but it meant enough that I felt the need to express it. This is an expression of my single-mindedness and the sheer devastation that being wrong tends to have on me relating to things and people that I’m especially emotionally invested in (whether or not I’m aware of it). A kind of melancholic fragility.

Originally prod. Nov28/2015

• Windsor & Newton India Ink, Colored Inks (Speedball Red, W&N Canary Yellow, Green Apple, White)

• Dip Pen (Hunt EX-Fine 512)

• Watercolor brush (Escoda Synth. Round Point 8)