Me, the deer and the bulb

A continuation of the self portrait project.

Two words were chosen from a hat, my words were ‘deer’ and bulb’. The task, to create a new painting that incorporates a self portrait with the chosen words.

The painting could take any form or style.

I decided to continue with the theme of humanitarian injustice. My artwork was to portray a live auction of females. My idea came from a documentary program I had seen about young girls in Bangladesh being sold as sex slaves. They were waiting in a room and paraded in front of men to be sold off. Most of the men were old enough to be their grandfather. A large part of the film had been made undercover and was extremely distressing.

I needed to incorporate the chosen words. I took the theme of ‘fear and startled’ for the deer, using the context of a deer startled in headlights, in other words to be so frightened that you cannot move or think. During the initial sketching process I combined the self portrait with the head of a deer to emphasise the connection.

My self portrait section of the picture represents my fear before escaping from my previous life.

For the bulb I was inspired by Philip Guston. In his work he uses everyday items and often includes a light bulb. He also portrays work with a KKK connection which could indicate some sort of interrogation.

Some time ago I painted a series of pictures from a photograph of my grandson, they developed during the process into what would appear to be an interrogation scene. At the time I had no knowledge of Philip Guston, the end result was uncannily similar to the work of Guston, who I now take inspiration from.

Initially I decided to create the female heads using a zentangle approach but the end result was too busy to have multiple heads with so much detail. I then used watercolour to create a series of heads that started colourful and eventually ended up a very pale grey. This approach was to portray the girl’s lives being taken from them. Where there may have been joy and happiness (colour) it would be stripped from them as they were sold into this hidden world of abuse. The hands over the mouths are silencing the girls, significant in that victims of abuse have no voice.

The perpetrators number 12 plus their ‘master’. Twelve is a significant number in numerous themes and topics. For example, religion, mythological, magic, zodiac, hours on the clock, even in ‘old money’ where 12 shillings made a pound and 12 inches make a foot. In the bible twelve symbolises power and authority. Often, especially in religion, there are 12 elements worshipping their master, this is the context I have used in selecting the number of ‘purchasers’.

In the central section of the painting the image shows a digger and ‘rubble’, taken from the story of the Terracotta Army in China, where the warriors were discovered in a destroyed state. It represents the destruction of the lives of the girls.