Impaled, a piece I did for Swish back in 2019 following a conversation we had at Anthrocon that year. Commentary below the cut.
I can't remember what day it was, but it was definitely the evening on the weekend. I think Swish was talking about their particular pet peeve with the orientation of stoplights. According to them, horizontal stoplights should be placed on horizontal poles, and vertical stoplights on vertical poles, never mixing the two orientations. I thought it was silly until they showed me an egregious example of a horizontal stoplight somewhere in Texas that was mounted on a vertical pole—I immediately made the comparison to the way one might impale a head on the end of a pole as a warning.
Around this time I also happened to be brushing up on some cinematic colour theory and composition techniques. One thing led to another, and well, here we are.
It's a little complicated, this one, despite it just having two objects, but for me it's the dichotomy: at one hand, the comfort of things I enjoyed at the time, like being able to talk to an artist like Swish, at a con where it felt like the looming entropy of the world had abated. Yet it was also a moment of being off-kilter and perhaps an early lament. It was going to end eventually. Maybe this was a way to sort of keep that going, by making it into a painting.
I tried to capture this by putting him ahead of me in the picture, with the stoplight telling me stop, and tinted green all around. Like following someone to an intersection, before they pull out ahead of you, looking left to check for traffic, before leaving you behind. Isolating, but routine, and with not much to be done.
