My Loss of View
Body language can, at times, tell us more about a person’s emotional state than their facial expressions or words. This piece is the fourth in a series which uses a surrogate, specifically an artist’s lay model, to express emotion. Rather than concentrate on the human figure, I’ve chosen the surrogate in the lay model, an effort to add life to an inanimate object, by positioning in a way that transmits the emotion to the viewer and completes the narrative of the painting.
A figure in a grieving position crouches under a strangely darkened sky, surrounded by a treeless landscape, devoid of humanity. A rising planet casts an eerie glow over the central figures. While the setting is imaginary to the extreme, it presents an issue of irrationality as it is juxtaposed against the level of grief of the figure. A brilliantly colored sunset over the ocean is contained within the walls of a transparent box. The sunset, which represents death in this case, is undoubtedly the central object in the painting, however, without the sense of loss or grief expressed by the figure draped over the box, it could be perceived as being part of a current reality. However, when one acknowledges the grief expressed by the body language of the figure, one can see that while the viewer can see the sunset it becomes evident that the sunset is actually the missing part—it’s gone—like death it is just a memory of a past reality that cannot be retrieved.
Dana Doran 