Artist Statement

My painting, Plucked Owl, is oil on 1.5' X 1.5' stretched canvas. Inspired by Frida Kahlo's "The Broken Column" in which Frida expresses her physical pain of a broken spine through the symbolic representation of a shattered ionic column inside her. I personally do not have physical pains great enough to drive my piece, so, I decided to drip out some taxing mental stressors.

The composition is a landscape of the Sandia Mountains, a view as familiar as the city itself while swaying away from the architectural works of other people. Despite the open wilderness, the message of my piece involves the opposite. There are three main focal points, a moon, an owl, and myself. I positioned myself in the front, slightly to the side of the center. This is because I, like many, instinctually see myself as the center, but knowledgeably see that I’m insignificant with respect to time. With this mindset, life becomes not just quantifiable but is in a state of inflation. Quantity decreases the value and the thought of procreation feels like a collective death rather than an individual life. This caused my nipple to bleed. In this piece, the bleeding nipple is used as symbolizing life and nurture and my fear of how it’s killing us.

I decided to paint myself nude for multiple reasons; Frida Kahlo is physically “exposed” in “The Broken Column” and I wanted to match a similar level of exposure and vulnerability; being male and having an exposed top felt less effective than full nudity. I also wanted to practice drawing the figure through a self-portrait. It seemed appropriate to use raw body depictions to express personal acceptance of being an ape on a rock (that is, a person on Earth) rather than anything more meaningful.

The owl has the more orthodox meaning behind it. Owls are an ancient symbol of death, bad health, and/or bad luck in multiple cultures. The owl looks at us as this omen gazes into this generation and the next. The owl is painted without feathers because this omen of ill health feels unnatural in the sense that it’s a derivative of human production. This makes the bird less recognizable at first. As people have had little time to recognize a featherless owl, our species has had little experience dealing the problem of not getting enough nature.

The moon functions to indicate the time of day, early morning, and light is just being shed. The ground is an array burnt sienna hues at varying values to distinguish light from dark and create depth. Burnt sienna is warm from the red, which contrasts nicely with the blue sky and flesh tones. The attempt was to make the ground appear warm and the air cooler. This was to convey feeling of immersion. Though I am artistically inclined to use warm earth tones, I felt that this piece benefitted from the atmosphere the colors communicated. The palate facilitates a sort of muddiness, a mental fogginess, that conveys the psychological anguish I wanted to communicate in this piece.  The contrast between the cool blue sky and the warmer natural pigments serve to reiterate my themes of exposure and mental honesty.