11 x 14, wooden canvas, 3D rendering and acrylic paint. Completed November 2022
11 x 14, wooden canvas, 3D rendering and acrylic paint. Completed November 2022
11 x 14
Film and color pencil
June 2023
Humans are a social species and thrive in groups of like minded individuals. Our earliest ancestors lived in packs and the lonewolf of the group tended to perish without the support of its family. In a sense being in a collective or in a group that accepts you, is a more instinctual need than an intellectual one. This need has been physically hardwired into our brains, and has allowed us to work together and evolve as a species. However, this has also caused us to ostracize people who are loners and deem them weird and almost inhuman (or suffering from a mental illness) in their ability to survive alone. Loneliness isn’t tangible, and we can survive on our own if we needed to. Yet humans fear loneliness and rejection, and we can feel physical pain and suffer mental damage when we experience it.
Humans are afraid of the unknown because we are afraid of changes; we like stability. What makes something “unknown” is what we haven’t yet experienced. Thoughts and actions are based on experience, that is, something that we can categorized and define. In other words, with experience we can predict actions or reactions. If we don’t have these parameters to use to categorize a situation, we can’t make predictions. When we can’t predict or approach something from an intellectual point of view, the greater the uncertainty and therefore the fear!
All humans, animals and eventually the entirety of the very universe will die. But what happens after death? Humans have asked this since ancient times and have created gods and religions in order to answer that very question. The fear of death could be linked to religion. If your faith dictates that there is a good and a bad afterlife, the fear could be you will end up in the latter. The fear I focused on is not linked to religion at all. I focused on the underlying fear that no religion is true, and that when one dies they cease to exist. The thought of no longer existing or having any thoughts and just ceasing to be is something so abstract, that the human mind cannot comprehend it.
An oriole sits within a decaying background while grasping a blank pole. It looks towards a gilded future; a golden but debauched pattern of cautious optimism despite its world dying and fading around it.
Pet portrait done in color pencil.
Pet portrait done in color pencil.
Commissioned piece of one of my characters, Alice. Done in colored pencil.
The main character for “Black Canvas.” She is the adopted daughter of Leonas Hester, and the only outsider let in by the Hester family.
