This work is inspired by the lives of many Vets. The colors are those of the soil of Iraq and Afghanistan where so many of today’s Veterans have served.
This painting is presented as a diptych: a painting in two parts, each equally important, separated by a chasm which nothing can truly bridge - combat. Crossing this chasm is a tremendous, overwhelming life changing event shared by many, yet rarely truly understood by others.
On the left, we find a somewhat dreamy, rather soft yet interestingly in motion, non figurative landscape, sweet hollows and ridges - an ordinary life from before untouched by war.
On the right, the dreamy landscape continues, however the colors become jarring, more intense, the blacks are more present, the browns and darker browns take up more space, mottled grays bubble and boil. The large blank patch on the bottom right comes as a relief - it is an opening and a possibility that calm, if not serenity, may still be found.
Left to right, before and after - this is the Veteran’s journey from a life of ordinary circumstances on the left, through the rupture of combat where nothing is ever the same, to the post-combat turmoil, where one struggles to create order from chaos and return to a new normality.
