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pixieface — Two Weeks from Everywhere
Published: 2010-09-24 18:08:19 +0000 UTC; Views: 1604; Favourites: 38; Downloads: 0
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Personal work - finished about a week ago. Made in Open Canvas 1.1."Well, ain't this place just a geographical oddity. Two weeks from everywhere!" - Ulysses Everett McGill, O Brother Where Art Thou?
I've been thinking a lot lately about environment, and how people interpret their environments - how the things we know, the places we've lived and seen, the experiences we've had colour how we look at new places, people and things. We filter things through the eyes of our entire lifetime. It's often on my mind, having been transplanted from one country to another; I get lost a lot, my navigational skills aren't useful here, and everything's different and sometimes very counter-intuitive. The way I look at the world sometimes feels very useless here; and sometimes it gives me insight into things I otherwise might not understand.
The buildings in all three of these recent paintings are what I've mentally termed 'composite buildings', which are collections of disparate places and ideas superimposed upon each other, existing in the same place at the same time, merging in order to creating something harmonious and entirely new; fantasy landscapes which don't and can't exist anywhere but in my head.
In a way, it's an internal conflict externalised - a process of making that which is seen and that which is known combine, and coexist happily. It's a form of resolution; maybe a way of dealing with it, or at least acknowledging it.
Anyway, I like it, and it was something I needed to get out, I think. (:
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Comments: 11
The light in this picture is beautiful, especially the reflections on the road. Lovely colours as well, vibrant without destroying the night-time feel. And your composite buildings are fascinating to look at.
I love the choice of title as well. It seems to suit the empty car somehow.
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Thank you! 
I adore wet pavement, especially at night when the lights reflect, and the quote is from my most favourite film of all time.
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I hope it gets a prominent wall position.
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That...is amazingly realistic. It's so beautiful, I really love it, you did well.
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Reflections on the street = YES!!! I love the colors.. I can just smell and hear what this place feels like through those colors.
I have also been living in another country for a long time.. I know that feeling of like.. a lack of navigation. But actually that's something I love, it makes every day an adventure. I notice things no one else does, I find pleasure in things that everyone else thinks are usual.
I like how you said "that which is seen and that which is known coexist happily."
I think I'm really lucky to have found an apartment with elements from what I'm familiar with, despite the layout of the house being completely foreign. I feel like no matter how lost the outside world is, at least the place where I live is like in that space between two worlds where I can feel at peace.
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I struggle with it a lot, to be honest. I thought it would get easier with time, and to some extent it has, but I still feel like the odd one out a lot of the time. It has been far more difficult than I imagined it would be, and for weird reasons; it's all the little things that constantly challenge me, not the big ones.
It always makes me think of something Hunter says in Fear and Loathing: "I've never been able to properly explain myself in this climate." Sometimes, I am not sure who I am in this strange world, because I clearly don't belong and a lot of the simple things (renewing a drivers' license, for example) are things that are second nature and barely need to be thought about to everyone who was born here, but aren't to me. And that can be difficult, sometimes.
But other times it is nice - I have a unique perspective on certain things because I have an outside reference not many other people here have. I get to see and do things people in England never do. The other day I saw a hummingbird in the garden. I never thought I'd see a real hummingbird in the flesh! But there it was, in my garden.
I think the painting needed to be made because it's necessary to find that balance, the harmony that can exist between prior experience and current, in order to feel fully content in a place. Despite the difficulties, the clash and contradictions can create something very unusual. So I definitely think there are advantages to being a stranger in a strange land, as well is disadvantages.
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Yeah!!
Our experiences are pretty different, but I can totally understand what you mean.
For me part of it is having to accept that I will ALWAYS be the odd one out because of how I look. That was the hardest challenge I've had to overcome. It doesn't bother me so much this year, though. The color of my hair and my skin set me apart from everyone around me, and I just have to go with it, be proud of it, accept that my place here is not assimilation but more like symbiosis.
Yeah hummingbirds! That's great.
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Not assimilation but more like symbiosis - that's a lovely way of putting it.
Nobody asked me what kind of music I was into, or what I did for a living, or anything else. Just "where are you from? I love your accent!" It got so wearing.
Recently it's stopped happening though. Makes me wonder if I'm losing my British accent. If I am, my family haven't commented on it... and I speak to them at least once a week.
Not sure which I prefer, really. Having a British accent and being treated like a curiosity everywhere I went, or not having one and losing that bit of me.
You saying that it should be more like symbiosis than assimilation makes sense. There are degrees that exist between being entirely other and being entirely the same and at home. The trick, I guess, is finding the comfort zone that exists between those two extremes.
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I adore this. The quote really informs how I look at it, too. All that light smearing across the cracks and uneven asphalt. Wonderful stuff.
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Thank you!
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