The Civil War has been on my mind..
The only brush I really use was frustrating me, so I painted the majority of this piece using a BUTTER KNIFE. Revolutionary!
(Of course, a little finger painting is a given with each painting. It’s no fun unless I’m making a mess.)
“Pissant” is my depiction of one who is considered insignificant.
It occurred to me how the structure of our concepts of reality, religion, culture, and ourselves is derived from vicarious experience. As we grow, we learn to watch others more closely and study correct behavioral patterns. The reactions of the whole to an individual’s appearance, personality, actions, etc, generates our consensus for what is acceptable or unacceptable for us to become.
Why was I created? What is my purpose? What does my maker believe about me? What is wrong and right? Who should I become? The answers to these kind of earth-shaking questions can absolutely build or destroy a soul. Obviously parents have the most immediate and effective opportunity to manipulate the development of their children’s persona, and introducing religion can have astronomical effects. Culture plays a huge part in shaping our environment, and in turn shaping us. So, the mold of society chisels away. It can be a brutal, unbearably painful process. Remember those teenage years? Everything you’re not is revealed by those relentlessly defining teenagers around you and the chiseling away continues.
A fully developed schema may continue analyzing others, but they can never add up to the sum of everyone around them. This gives birth to so many negative developments and fractions of one’s character, such as what I’m attempting to portray through “Pissant”. Feelings of worthlessness, jealousy, isolation, rejection, and anger overcome someone who is unable to meet the expectations of what’s acceptable to those around them. A wall of glass wedges between the subject and those around him, until all he can do is peer through at others, living vicariously through them and internalizing his inadequacies.
They’re coming. I can feel it. Heavy, dark energy squeezing the breath from me, surrounding and filling every space. Its not time yet. Not before the roaring, screeching sound of it brushing my skin. Electricity and energy thrills me, immobilizing every nerve in my body. It wants to have me.. Something as cold as ice builds inside of my body, gathering, growing, moving upwards and burning all the way. I am free.
Ameiliael 