Painting for your own family is always tricky. On one hand you really want to make them proud and on the flip side you're a bit worried you're going to give them too much insight into what you're really like. Painting for you regiment is the same way. You spend a great deal of time creating and maintaining a persona and the last thing you want to do is have people looking at your painting, pausing and then looking at you with bewilderment. Now to be clear, I don't have either of these issues with my family or regiment. They all think I'm a bit odd and I'm pretty sure I couldn't surprise then short of running around naked and barking.... no wait, they've seen that to.
I committed to do a painting for each of the messes in my regiment as part of it's 150th anniversary. This painting below is for the Senior NCO's Mess and is a mix of collage, acrylic and found objects. As I was painting and assembling it, I had a very clear picture of what I was trying to accomplish and after putting it up on the wall in the mess, I was pretty happy with the finished results. And even though I can't surprise anybody in either of my families any more, they can surprise me. Each person's interpretation is slightly different and yet they're all pretty much on point with the over-all theme. And in some cases, they've seen even more than I intended which is a great sign that the piece works and the people looking at it understand the subject matter better than I do. In short, everybody seemed to get it. Or they're just being nice to me, which is also something that families do.
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| "And Not to Yield" 2013 |
