 |
| The Well |
This was a commissioned painting. The request: portray a girl exploring her world. My mind naturally exploded outward in all directions. This girl could be anywhere. She could be commanding the waves, touching the clouds, tasting the stars, or listening to the earth's heartbeat.
Instead, I decided to paint a spiritual successor to a series I had worked on earlier for my senior thesis. In that series, a boy's imagination was turned outward to work on a dead land. Rather than put the girl in a desert among mechanical wrecks, I thought I'd put her somewhere vibrant, lush. Her world would be thriving from her imagination. And, since the boy's focus was turned outward, why not turn the girl's inward? So I put her in a natural well at the center of her world.
Initially, she was to be putting something representative of her imagination into this well. But that didn't feel right. Maybe she should be drawing something out? Communicating with a giant fish? No, and no. It felt better to put a sounding line in her hand, poised to plumb the depths of this natural well.
No comments:
Post a Comment