CONTEXT

There are times in life when we feel the forces of change bearing down on us. We usually recognize these as points for extreme emotion — pain, torment, conflict, suffering. To me these forces bear down on us in each new moment, each new second that passes us by. A new event, a new situation, a new thought, a new shift in the breeze, a new something. And no matter good or bad or absolutely inconsequential, the external forces us to submit the internal, to deconstruct — in other words die, and become again in the very next instance. But much of what we build in our psyche is exactly how we define ourselves as. What’s interesting to me is that the ‘perfect negative’ of our own definitions is also true — i.e. what is not part of our internal construction, is not part of our ID — what we reject in our definition of ourselves. Regardless, change is, really, the one true master of this world and the next.

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This painting and its reverse work are about change and the processes that we have to go through in each moment of our lives, period.

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Like all the other works in Personal Hieroglyphs, this work is also rooted in things that are around me. I’ve had this dead scarab beetle in a little box with me for a while now. You don’t normally find scarabs in the city now-a-days, so when this beautiful dying bug happened to be among the leaves of a potted plant in our balcony, I just had to pick him up and keep the little fellow. Scarabs have been a symbol of change since the days of the ancient Egyptians, and I wanted to reflect that in this work, treating the whole panel as one entity with a front and back, yet while keeping on side dominant and the other lurking underneath.

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