Waruta 2: Thoughts on Wading Pool

March 18, 2016 3:20 pm Leave your thoughts

It’s always interesting for me to stand back and observe how much the moods, symbols and style of execution in a particular painting can gradually evolve over time. For example, the scene portrayed in Wading Pool originally took place at dawn, there were no wolves, there were rainbow colored light bars flanking the pool (constructed from photos of police sirens), and the perimeter of the pool was oval instead of hexagonal.

Wading Pool may be trying to illustrate my childish vision of what a clearing in the woods would look like in the midnight hours, at an age when I had never actually been awake (lucidly at least) during these hours in my own familiar surroundings let alone some distant wilderness. This span of time was still a mystery to me and so, like all children, I was free to use my imagination to fill in the gaps left by ignorance. As with most of my current work, there are technically no human figures to be seen, but to me there is still a human presence in various forms. I imagine the small pool to be either an incubator or a cradle that a child could be placed in, or the pool could represent the child itself. I tried to create a safe haven within the landscape marked by visible boundaries, a controlled environment within a chaotic one representing either the literal place that one grows up in or a materialization of the culture we are born into, the version of reality that’s imposed on us at an early age by our caretaker(s). The wolves could be those caretakers, protective and serving as interpreters of the wilderness, or they could collectively represent the crude reality we are eventually forced to come to terms with. They might symbolize the potentially violent nature lurking within the human caretakers we are born trusting in, or maybe they’re the animalistic side of ourselves we have yet to discover.

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