rotten teeth

10. degradation; nature chews on me

— which i interpret as a double entendre: my nature/desires degrade/destroy me; we as humans are a part of nature, and therefore are impermanent and degrade over time.

this was a monochrome painting i had to do for an assignment in my painting 300 class where we had to go outside and choose an object whose colour we were drawn to and then from that object look around for another thing that same colour and so on. I was initially drawn to this old muted green victorian style house, so green is the colour i went with. naturally with green, much of what I saw were plants. However, it’s winter and snowy where I live so most plants were wilted and dead and a dark muted brownish shade of green.

i also remembered seeing a bright green sticker on a rotten banana peel that was stuck in some dead bushes. i wouldn’t have even seen it if it weren’t for the bright green sticker on it. seeing the rotten banana got me thinking- if green = life does lack of green = lack of life?

~

this was one my first pieces done in my first semester of painting back in the fall of 2023. i think im going to try and revisit the idea of using nasa’s juno spaceship captures of jupiter again as a reference in my work because it was so fun.