Spectre 1

"Spectre 1" is the first of an ongoing series of self-portraits. As of late, and in many aspects of my life, I feel lost, restless and empty. I regularly grapple with the conflict between meaning and meaninglessness. Are humans supposed to create meaning for themselves? If so, how and with what? Do my queries stem from our human fear of meaninglessness? How should meaninglessness, as an occasional reality, be addressed - with acknowledgement or with avoidance?

I wanted to transmute these emotions into a color field painting superimposed with a silhouette of me in graphite (drawn by standing in front of natural light and tracing my shadow on canvas). With this piece, I chose to follow my intuition on the colors, and purposefully chose jarring ones because they felt like hues that I or the viewer could drown in. I treat them as non-places because, while they fill up space, they also convey "nothingness." I believe that by using very basic visual elements, I could better understand myself and the human condition.