Title: Into the sea
Kind: painting
Size: 90x70x1,5 cm
Material: acrylic on canvas
What you see: A harbor at sunrise. There are two figures in the painting: a yellow square and a purple triangle figure. The square throws a purple triangle into the sea, the triangle a yellow cube. There are already some (almost invisible) cubes and triangles in the water. On the left side of the harbor, there are triangles. On the right there are cubes.
I made the sketch two years before actually painting this. When I made the sketch, I was thinking a lot about climate change. When I painted it, I wasn't. Originally, the painting was about how throwing away things doesn't mean they are gone, and that garbage will stay. The sunset was originally a wall. I changed the meaning because I think there are enough paintings about this subject. I changed the meaning to this:
People are breaking each other down. They are letting others throw away parts of them because they want to fit in. There are a lot of things that form a human being: weird trades, habits, different aspects of a personality. Some are small (the smaller cubes and triangles), some are big (the big cubes and triangles). Even when all of those things are gone, no one can ever truly fit in. What is left of them is small, but it is still a different shape. But what shape would fit? None. The people who are throwing things away, all have a different shape as well. They try to make the other person that same shape. But there are (not visible on the painting) multiple people trying to change you, all with a different shape, different expectations. Trying to fit into every single one of them, will never work.
In this painting, I used all kinds of painting techniques I have learned. I used the same kind of figures for this painting as for my stop motion project because I like how simple it is. It ignores specific differences between normal-looking humans but does show everyone is different.
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