Incomplete the Circle

I’m glad people like this and have noted like the difficulty of looking away from it once you look at it. I guess I’m pleased bc I was very specifically trying to accomplish that as a form of horror. Where your eye is drawn all over the canvas but there is nowhere for it to rest. And in fact everywhere you look it’s staring back at you helplessly. Something is trying to grab your attention and consume you and get you to consume it. To draw you into its composition. And the more you look the more painful and disgusting and less beautiful it is. and there’s really no escape from it no matter where you look. Its state of decomposition and confusion and yet trying to string itself together into a complete whole is akin to the increasing feelings of disgust and contempt you might feel for it keeping you trapped there in that moment, realizing the chaos is ultimately accomplishing nothing. Nothing really stands out as the most important thing in the composition, there is nowhere to rest except to look away. Something about the attention economy and its effects on how art is created and consumed. Bc that’s sort of central to the narrative framing of these characters I’m trying to write and it’s been tricky for me to pull that off with writing in a way that is a lot easier with visual if only bc you have bright eye hurting colors on your side. And I’ve been practicing those sorts of visuals and if you are forced to stare at things that long it becomes more intuitive to trap yourself in the image to keep yourself from getting bored while drawing it. And just, this knowledge that when creating something which the audience feels no innate tie to, you have to force that tie, you have to pierce the eyes and beg for recognition. But eventually the audience has to look away and move on, and whatever is trapped in there cannot, the fourth wall is there and it will remain there no matter how hard it struggles to be out here or you to become lost in it. For me there’s just a specific form of horror in the desire to be seen and consumed and the desperation and fear this can invoke.

Petition for some exorbitantly rich monarch to commission -me- to paint them slowly phasing into a disgusting decomposing meat wall. Why wasn’t this my job? I promise you, this is all I have ever wanted to be in life. The guy who paints rich people decomposing into a slurry of meat. Why. Why wasn’t it me???