Artistic Analysis: a Farewell to an Old Painting

Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote my last post! I guess I got busy. Trying to work a side job in education and develop an artistic career at the same time makes it hard to keep up with social media. Last weekend though, I did get to stay in my brand spanking new studio during Open Studio Tours and work on my latest piece while visitors trickled in and out.

I sold a painting that I did a long time ago, in 2010! I loved getting rid of it. Although it is one was of my favorites, it has been around a long time and I hoped that someday someone else would take over its care.

This piece is called Jealousy and I painted it right after the following small occurrence: I was hanging out with a friend who'd recently broke up with a girlfriend of his whom I never met. Suddenly, for the first time ever, she decided to visit unexpectedly since the break up. He never told me about her, because we'd become friends only recently, and so I had no idea who she was, but I could tell that something was wrong due to her pensive manner and her carefully observant glances of me. I just couldn't understand what the problem was. After she left, he explained to me what was happening and it all made sense.

So then I made this drawing/painting, and although I did not set out with the intention of depicting this event, it turned out that the image closely resembled the situation. On the left is a little child like spirit, representing carefree joy. Next to the child is a lady who has wild hair, and a fun polka dot dress with unusual blue lip stick, she is a symbolic representation of myself at the time. Next is a man with a long orange beard who seems awkward and lost, that's my friend, he didn't have a long beard but he did have reddish hair and large blue eyes, and he did feel awkward and trapped. Lastly there's a lady who seems very prim and proper and has a bit of a judgmental expression on her face. That's my friend's ex-girlfriend.

Some other details: there's a glass of juice labeled so in Russian, standing on the table between the child spirit and myself, I think that is representative of innocence in contrast to the bottle of vodka, labeled so in Russian, standing between my friend and his ex, which I think represents some darker, heavier emotion. Also, something you can't see in this image but is evident in the original, is there's a snake that slithers along the bottom of the entire painting, and I think this snake represents the poisonous nature of the relationship my friend described to me after his ex left.

None of this analysis was in my conscious mind while I made the image. It was only after I was done with it and showed it to my friend that we were able to analyze and come up with all the parallels.