Vulnerabilities Of Truth

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable… A quote by C.S. Lewis.

The notion of being vulnerable might sound like weakness, but knowing the vulnerabilities exist and embracing them fully makes a person strong. To be vulnerable is to be real, for even the strongest, such as tigers, are vulnerable. In the series One Hundred Years Of Solitude, my art focuses on certain themes central to our emotional and social existence and what makes us human.

The painting is not a depiction of a fantasy. The subjects can be interpreted as metaphors for the fragilities of life — maybe not actual tigers crossing our path, but rather the impediments, emptiness, imminent dangers, deaths, and waning memories, that we all, if we’re being truthful, must inevitably encounter in life, and through which we must make decisions and push forward.

Detail.

Detail.

Detail.

The Leviathan

While we continue down the path of a technological revolution, shrouded by a digital world, the forces of nature and the beasts that kill continue to be subjects of our dramatics. The further we appear to distance ourselves from the natural environment, the more we are drawn to it, the more we find the necessity to protect it, the more concerns we find for it, the more we understand that its destruction means our own. 

The mystery of the ocean and its creatures has inspired the human spirit since ancient times. Sharks, like other marine giants, have been symbols of death and fear, indestructible creatures representative of an infinite oceanic expanse. In current times, however, we have discovered that even sharks are vulnerable, the ocean has limited resources, and the network of human existence connects beyond the contacts on our phones and computers into all physical realms of the planet.   

Beyond the environmental references of this painting are that of our own struggles, a metaphor for the conflicts each of us encounter, impenetrable forces, violence, captivity, the unknown, and how we respond, like the tides, in a fall or rise.  

Leviathan, oil, acrylic, canvas, 2015.