When painting certain characters for my next book Chronicles of Fear - Tales of Woe, I based it on the idea that their profile had popped up on a dating app. It coincided with the thought that one of people's biggest fears is being unloved. Not being loved overlaps with the need to be seen, valued, and of course, having someone else to love back.
In observing my friends that are dating, in particular, when they use dating apps, they are, in fact, shopping. They are hunting on eharmony, Match, or Tinder for that magic salve with all the ingredients to relieve that itch. There isn't anything wrong with wanting certain qualities in a mate. Looking for traits that make someone attractive is reasonable.
The part misaligned with the quest is, how do you summarize a soul in a selfie and tagline? If dating apps are giant digital shopping malls, it's like the product is designing its own marketing strategy. When it comes to personal identity, isn't that an abstract concept? Isn't our experience of another person more important than who they say they are? Packaging something as complex as an individual, is it being presented to appeal to the broadest audience or the select few who will "get it"?
The portraits for my book, Chronicles of Fear, start with a core of some awkward, disastrous, or otherwise difficult characteristic. When I say portrait, I'm talking about illustrations. The writing comes after. To further complicate the procedure, I don't start with sketches or drawings when inventing these dramatis personae. I begin by making random marks and splashes on a page and search for them. It starts by seeing the curve of a lip, the slant of an eyebrow, and then I cobble the rest together.
It is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without having a reference to the finished image. I'm hanging on to the idea that I've seen someone in the amorphous pool of brushstrokes with the beginnings of what I'm looking for, and I have to paint them out of chaos into a recognizable being.
These searches are a quest for an undesirable type, a nervous wreck, an overconfident bore. After the long haul of "finding" them, I'm always left with affection for them. While painting the annoying trope, empathy and humor creep in and transform my feelings about the character into ones I care about.
Human beings can be difficult to love. We're all complicated. It seems like relationships are designed to fail. And, of course, falling in love with a painting is less complex than falling in love with a person. Maybe the way we surf the internet, being distracted and attracted by all that twinkles, makes it more challenging to sit with someone and figure out what makes them beautiful.
Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden -Life is Full of Pricks (Indigo Raven Publishing, 2021) and Fairy Tale Remnants (Indigo Raven Publishing, 2019) Are available on Amazon in paperback and ebook.
Chronicles of Fear - Tales of Woe will be released in Fall 2023 in paperback and ebook on Amazon and select retail outlets.
My solo show, Villains and Heroes, will be opening at Brassworks Gallery in Portland, Oregon, on November 12, 2023
