A Little Perspective

Hello everyone. 

I haven’t posted anything new here on my blog in a while, so I thought now is as good a time as any to share some more paintings I created.

A couple of months ago I was driving in my car and I was listening to music on my iPod. The song that played was Gehenna by Slipknot. I noticed a passage in the lyrics that resonated with me: 

“Free my severed eyes”

And this really got me thinking. How in a way it would be pretty awesome if one actually could remove ones eyes and have them flying off and upwards, but still being able to see with them. we would get a completely different view over what is, a totally different perspective on what is going on. And so the following painting was born.

She is not actually crying from sadness, I was aiming at showing an overflow of emotion that is released through her tears. She does appear to be sad by just looking at her, but she must not neccessarily be sad. She is releasing a flock of flying eyes in order to gain a different viewpoint, or perspective, on whatever it is she is currently mentally invested in.

And would it not be great to have a little flock of eyes as pets? I know I would love it ;-)

I thought my kids would be put off by the painting but on the contrary. I was telling them I was thinking of painting a large flying eye, and one of my sons had the idea to make it a unicorn eyeball. 

So I did...

You could also call this an intergenerational piece, as my son participayed with the idea, and I painted it using some paints from my grandmothers palette...

The unicorn eye looked too good and angelic to be true though, I felt it needed some sort of a counterpart. I was reminded of the concept of shoulder angels and shoulder devils that seem to influence our decisionmaking sometimes.

This idea of gaining a different perspective and looking at a problem or a thought from a different viewpoint is still very strong with me and a very important part of my toolset to manage anxiety.

But the best thing? All of this is based on me hearing the lyrics to the song wrong! I posted the link to the song with lyrics, and you will notice that he does not sing “free my severed eye” but “free my severed heart” instead. I think I simply got the message I needed to hear at the time; and I still hear “severed eyes” everytime I listen to the song ;-)