The Bone-Yard Walk
Originally uploaded by rsconnett
ACRYLIC ON WOOD COMPOSITE PANEL 16" X 20" (40.6 cm x 50.8 cm)
Completion date 3/25/2009
A bone-yard is a graveyard, and represents death. We walk a path from birth to death starting the day we're born. Some walks are further than others. Some hardly get a few steps. None of our roads seem very long. Hardly long enough to understand the point of the walk.
This painting is self-allegory. Personal feelings at the time of painting it. It's depressing. It's a little scary. My life is full of death and dieing these past several years. Dieing people are all around me. In the past 33 months there have been three deaths of people close to me. Not good deaths. Horrible deaths.
Most deaths are horrible. Often, people don't know that. Especially when you are young, and not exposed to very much dieing, (if you are lucky) you think of death as happening in a nicer way than it usually happens. Either "crash and burn heroic death", or "die in your sleep with your loving family" death. Unfortunately, the reality as I've seen it is that death is appalling. The best death is a quick and unforeseen death. This sort of dieing is the rarest of the rare. Quick and unforeseen death hardly ever happens.
Cancer took two of these people who died in my sphere. This walker in my painting is pregnant with cancer. Cancer gets it's hooks into you and weaves itself inside you so densely that there's no way to cut it out without killing you. What could be more frightening than to realize you have cancer growing inside you? That thing on/in, and which is her belly is my metaphoric cancer creature.
The bones strewn upon the road are a metaphor for the dead hopes and dreams we leave behind us on our walk.
I have sacrificed many things I hold dear as I have ventured on my walk. The severed limbs also represent this for me. I have sacrificed and compromised on my walk many more times than I ever thought I would. Allegorically speaking, I'm headed to becoming a torso with four stumps. (ha! ha!)
The self immolation of the hand is also an analogy for the conscience decision to part with important ideals for the sake of "survival". It seems at odds to say one must sacrifice the things important in life to keep living it, yet this seems to be the norm. I can speak only for myself of course.
I feel myself becoming crippled. I'm deteriorating myself as I walk down this road. Death can be a slow process. A piece here, and a piece there, and some day there's nothing left. All these pieces are left on the road. The bone-yard road is strewn with the detritus of life's cast off ambitions.
Who are the fat cretins on the road,? They are me, of course. They are me as I see myself in a mirror; flaccid, enervated and unfit. Grotesque and ridiculous. Blemished hairy and stinking. A gross flesh-bag of putrified sludge. Ugly beyond redemption. I've got a fishbowl on my head because I am an alien.
Why is the city burning? The city of Los Angeles is always on fire. It is always hot and dry and smoking. The city terrorizes me. The people chill and disgust me. Los Angeles is a smoking poisonous horror. A monstrosity behind a mask. Dangerous, the hearts of it's citizens are filled with ignorance and malice. Fleeting superficial beauty under a poison cloud. LA is a mutant machine that runs on the blood and souls of men and women.
I live in a hideout in the hills, off a dirt road. I have posted hand painted signs of danger to drivers who mistakenly approach my dead end road; "DO NOT ENTER, YOU WILL GET STUCK! LOOSE GRAVEL! TURN BACK!" That keeps most people away. I am reluctant to leave my hideaway.
As long as that candle in the walkers head is alight, I am still me. I will keep walking.
NOTE: this painting will be shown at the upcoming group art exhibition; "SAY WHEN" at the "BOLD HYPE GALLERY" , April 4th Through May 10th, 2009 in Orlando Florida. For more info check out the website; www.boldhype.com
