ARTISM blog – art work of the month – May 09 “Eleanor”
This month’s featured art work is titled “Eleanor“. It’s title comes from the Beatles song Eleanor Rigby which I feel is a song that captures aloneness. I have rarely felt lonely but I experience aloneness all the time. I’m solitary by nature and by choice and I cherish my solitude enormously, often too much and have tended toward agoraphobia which has effected family members on both sides of my family. I’m only moderately agoraphobic now, its more a lightweight but fairly constant avoidance of going outside but once I’m out there I’m actually fine and I’m the same way with socialising, I’m a social phobe whose fine once I get going. Faceblindness, context blindness and meaning deafness probably contribute and having tics and bipolar challenges makes it harder to feel at ease with the push and pull of the social world. Perhaps that’s just artists for ya.
I spend most of my days in silence, though it never feels that way because when I type I feel I’m speaking, when I play piano I feel I’m speaking, when I paint or sculpt I feel I’m speaking, just speaking through my fingers is my forte, its my home. I am also a people watcher, and a studier or form and pattern, or architecture and space. I trace lines, find symmetry, feel space through my body. For me, the painting captures that natural ‘outsider’ but also the observer who is at a crossroads surrounded by the homes of people whose lives are all in there behind the walls. Yet the street is abandoned, Eleanor is free to walk them, to know those lives from the other side of a wall. And the crossroad, too, is symbolic. In this case of development and its stages and the choices of direction which face us at life’s crossroads.
The work is acrylic on vinyl, in fact painted on wallpaper. I chose to do this one in monochrome because I like the lack of distraction in monochrome works. Like most of my figurative works, Eleanor is faceless, partly because I’m faceblind but also because this allows her to be any one of us, you, me, the stranger in the street.
Eleanor was painted on the same day as two other works, The Headless Hat and All At Sea, which are also monochrome works.
Hope you enjoyed the painting. You can find Eleanor and more of my works in my online gallery.
Warmly,
author, artist, singer songwriter, screenwriter
What an amazingly lovely blog layout; thoughtful illos and words. I am an artist and have read and enjoyed all your books; I passed them on to my daughter who is a teacher who also enjoyed them deeply.