Path of Passion
Materials: Canvas, acrylic paint, trauma, starting over, self-awareness and reflection, heaps of resilience, failure, energy, belief in oneself
Dimensions: 48x60
Series: None
Year: 2013
Price: $8,000
This is one of my very first large pieces. I remember sitting in a friend’s car saying “I want to go BIG” and thinking that 48x60 was an enormous size.
I originally called this piece Making It, because I told myself that when this piece sold I’d have “made it” in my career. That the sale of this piece was going to be proof of my success, and I swore I’d work on it continually till it sold.
The piece was overshadowed by much larger sales and thus it became a moot point to call it a marker of success, but it still had meaning. I realized later when I got smarter about my titles as a means of communicating my message, that this piece was really about much more than financial success. It was a snapshot of one’s life as well as of the entire world. It was a timeline as well as a map of relationships.
The lower part of the piece symbolizes one’s youth and how our interests and truest form of self-expression are often pulled in various directions and distracted by things left and right. And about as we’re starting to discover ourselves, something quite literally comes out of leftfield to “take us out”. Something challenges us and our values, our path, our nature, and our gifts so much that we have to define hard lines and boundaries. And when the dust settles from that scenario, what we are left with is an undeniable flow of creativity, in our way of serving the world.
Our gifts are undeniable at that point, and no matter what you do, it’s impossible to hide them.
The parallel message of this piece is that at any given time there are things happening in the world as a whole and in our worlds as individuals. Our boss’s relationship at home is as important as the starving child across the world, both impacting us, directly or indirectly. Thus our gifts impact not only those immediate to us, it butterfly effects our entire planet.