Torn

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aileen imperatrice

self portraits

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Torn

This particular piece, 30” x 48”, was a very difficult image for me to work on. It took me a while, not just in creating it, but working up to be able to create it. I warned my husband that I wouldn’t be the best person to be around when I was working on this painting, I knew that well ahead of time, because it’s a very negative piece; it’s art that represents some very negative experiences in my life. There are a couple of layers to this painting, the frame that surrounds it is a wooden box encompassing the painting in the center, hanging there hovering. There is a dowel toward the upper front of the box from which hangs a sheer piece of cloth; sheer enough to see the work underneath, but it definitely gives a haze to the whole painted image. I know what the painting looks like raw underneath. The chair is a Gothic style chair and I purposely did it in a rough treatment. I used reds, blacks and grays and a little bit of white, and it’s done very rough with a palette knife, with a brush, with china marker, all done in such a way that feels very uncomfortable. The top of the chair has details which are very sharp and foreboding for an incredibly uncomfortable situation. The background around the chair is blurry grey, white and black. The whole painting is meant to feel uncomfortable, yet I have this layer of gauzy clear cloth over it, to give a softening feel, and the reason I created it in this way, was because I wanted to show that within myself, I’ve had a varied number of negative experiences creating traumatic memories in my mind, making it very difficult for me to deal with certain things, but the veil is basically two things, it’s a shield that we all put up in our lives, whenever we have something that happens to us we tend to put up this little shield to help protect us from that negative feeling, trying to get on with our life. It’s a situation where I had this thin transparent veil trying to cover up that horrible situation, but it’s still there, it’s still a part of me, I can’t ignore it completely and it certainly invades how I respond to things. And it’s also signifying a way of trying to soften the situation. I was told to keep quiet. Told to ignore and the problem would just go away or that I was thinking more of it than there really was. I was told by adults to let it go and forget what was happening, that if I said anything that would not be right. So it’s veiling the situation so I don’t have it as exposed, and at the same time it’s also shielding me from having to deal with it on a daily basis. This particular string of events represented here is something that I’ve never really talked about with many people and try not to because it’s such a negative situation, I try to avoid it. I have for many years. But with this collection in particular, I felt I needed to deal with those evils and horrible events. As for the type of chair, we certainly know of various chairs that exist in our world that signify something, and one of the things about this specific chair is it looks similar to chairs you see in places of authority, and people who have great authority sit in them, there is a reason for that, because when you have a chair that is this big and commanding it tends to make people uneasy or it sets them in a mode of knowing that they have to fear that person or at least respect them. That’s the situation I was in where I was supposed to be respecting people or at least giving them some sort of respect and that was taken advantage of by that person to me.

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