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aileen imperatrice self portraits
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24” x 20” This painting has an interesting past because there is another painting underneath the image you see. In 2001, one of my first dogs as a married home owner, Brew, a beautiful male standard dachshund with whom I was very close, was going through medical problems. In July 2001 he took a turn for the worse and was diagnosed with Congestive Heart Failure. Just before that time, I had been working on a new painting I called Fortunate, Before he had started with his problems we had adopted our third dog Oscar, and we still had our first dog Camilla with us. The three of them combined were my ultimate dream. I had these wonderful, cute dachshunds, living a happy life, had a good job, a loving husband, a good home life, everything seemed wonderful, so I felt very fortunate, The painting was a fortune cookie with a paper tag coming out of it where I was going to write something to reflect on how fortunate I felt and also write some things around the edges of the painting to further represent my happiness, and my acknowledgement of my many blessings. I was working on this during the time that he was still with us and then he died on July 30th, 2001 and I was inconsolable. I felt at that point I was no longer fortunate, the reality of life hit me, I was very sad for a very long time and still am. I was never able to finish that painting. I kept looking at it, it was on my wall in my home studio and I just never got to finishing it because I never felt like I wanted to. And it came to a point now where I was working on this collection and I felt like I needed to do something with it because it was a part of my life, a direct expression of what I was feeling at the time, and if I couldn’t finish it then I needed to metamorphose it into something else. This painting which has different sections to it, is directly painted over the previous painting so you no longer see the fortune cookie anymore, but what you do see is a boxed in image of a blue chair with a cube in its back, and there are lines going from it outside of that boxed in area to two other cubes that are in another section of the painting, one is a blue cube on a little stool and another green cube that’s above. The blue cube is the same color as the blue chair, the cube in the chair is grey, very close to the background color within the boxed in area and the green cube is the same color of the frame around that area. The lines between the cubes are related to feelings of being whole at one moment on the left side with the blue chair, but then there is a part that is missing and that is the grey cube out of the center of the chair back – it’s not completely whole, and whereas once I felt fortunate, and complete in my happy little box, my happy little world, everything was there, even though there were some rough edges signified by the rough edges of the painting which I chose to include some of the lime green color peering through from the painting underneath, There are those other things that I am tied to outside, the stool that is not a complete chair, and the other cube that’s above it, it’s different parts of me that are now reminding me that I’m not as innocent as I used to be. We all have experiences in our life that bring us to the reality about how we really are, that we are not immortal and that the living beings we love are not immortal. We have to face that reality and I use the three cubes linked by the two lines to show things are tied together but are different parts of our life.
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© 2006 Aileen Imperatrice |
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