Pandora's Box

My sister *finally* got the painting I made for her birthday. Her birthday was in March, so Happy Belated Birthday, sis!

 


This painting is of the backyard to the house we grew up in. I think this backyard is symbolic in many ways. In fact, I have a large assortment of passionate feelings about that house. Some good, some bad. I think in many ways the backyard is the most benign, probably because I spent so much of my childhood there, before life got complicated. And I spent much of that time with my sister playing in our backyard. Those are my fondest memories of that house. And yet, there is a symbolism, a foreshadowing if I had only seen the writing on the wall *before* adolescence hit.

This is the explanation I sent to my buddy Benjamin:

"The way the collage effect is set and the mismatching of the two similar perspectives is intentional, conveying a general level of discomfort. The house was in fact striped, like that. The stripes of the house and the imposing angle of the swing set bars and chains are suppose to be suggestive of a jail. The circular item in the upper right hand corner is our airconditioning unit. Although I suppose one could interpret that as symbolizing coldness, I actually put that in, because as children we treated it like a toy, entertaining ourselves by listening, enchanted, to our altered voices as we talked into the whirring fan."