Identity Project.... Finished?

 

My piece makes a commentary on my identity rather than an explanation.  The figures in the painting are fictional illustrated characters that I have formed during the last year. They were formed after a best friend's car accident that left her brain dead.  The figures in the painting have similar bruising to hers when I saw her for the last times in the hospital and then wake.  

The figures represent the escapism defense mechanism that I have been using since the accident.  Creating a different, fictional world in order to cope with the present realities of accepting traumatic experiences.  The figure on the left is looking off, possibly at the wooden stake driven into the canvas.  He is weary, bruised, but determined and alert.  The girl on the right has a slight smirk, addressing the audience.  The boy's color is blue, the drips representing memories, internal like veins.  The girl's red drips for streaming blood, that has been exposed to oxygen.  As his blue memory tries to extend towards the right of the canvas, trying to connect to something, it is cut off by a smear of the blood of the red drips, leaving part of the blue drips floating without connection on the right hand of the canvas.  To me this symbolizes the accident.  Blood doesn't turn red unless its released.

The scarecrow in the back is the presence of alternate realities and escapism too.  I began drawing scarecrows in almost every piece after her death.  In a way scarecrows can be very cute but also very sad.  They are made to mimic being human, left in fields by themselves.  I think I use that as a metaphor for myself sometimes, when I don't feel like I fit in to the whole being human thing, isolated with certain feelings or experiences.

The pieces of wood driven into the canvas are related to experiences.  Within the last five years it seems that situation after situation keeps occuring.  Starting out with the death of my father, going through friend's suicides and murders, most recently ending with my best friend's death.  These wooden pieces are like the challenges coming through, piercing through the canvas.  The canvas in a way is like my skin I suppose.