The Paintings of Chimera Blues

 

THE PAINTINGS are rich, bright, and full of symbols set in scenes that seem infinite. The subjects in many of them are stifled, held too closely in one instance, abandoned in the next. These are struggles with isolation. Here are lives subjected to a poverty of will and imagination that often resolves itself in fanaticism. These are images of an insufficient maturity, of stunted spiritual and emotional growth.

 

Every child lives in two places at once. There is the world the family creates. Then there is the one the child must inhabit when parents are not around. Represented here are alternative realities. These are emotional spaces developed to bridge the differences, even gaps, between those two worlds. As children grow to become masters of their own fate, time should render these spaces unnecessary.

 

Instead, for some, there is an expensive loss of freedom and potential. Masks cover loneliness, confusion, and vulnerability. Most stand to face the viewer directly. Attempts to submit to a demanding normal, set by limiting cultural expectations, create a strange awkwardness. Everywhere life goes on anyway. Powerful. Objective. Beautiful. Life. Yet, it does not sustain. It does not take care. Isolated in groups, empty of ambition, the subjects of these paintings struggle to grow up. Alone. Split between the souls they are and the lives they seem forced live, they are all fractured dolls.

 

And the Zephyr screams…