Earth, Fire, Wind & Water

I'm finally writing about my new art series titled Earth, Fire, Wind & Water.  The series is in oil paints on canvas with feathers and rocks incorporated into the paint.  I think I've put off writing about this series because the inspiration is a painful one for me and very personal.  I also kind of hate saying that because I really enjoy getting others interpretations of the pieces without influencing them on why I actually painted them.  But here it goes...

As of now the series is 4 paintings, my intention wasn't to name them after the 4 elements, that just fell into place.  Let me start from the beginning.  It's kind of a sad fact that artist are often inspired by turmoil or pain that comes from life, this series was inspired by my last breakup.  With that pain these images flooded into my mind, at the time I was still healing and couldn't bring myself to paint so I sketched them out quickly so that I wouldn't forget them.  Once I got past the actual pain that inspired these pieces I was able to begin painting them, which is a healing process in itself.  These are all self portraits, again, making this series is very personal, and I wanted to do something different, something expressive so I decided to use oils which I haven't done since art school.

Why the feathers and the rocks?  I love feathers, I have collected them for years.  This was putting another piece of myself into these paintings, possibly a piece of hope in all this pain.  The rocks are beautiful but hard, part of the earth, solid, expressing a different part of myself, the rough raged, hard sharp surface of my pain.  However these rocks also sparkle and shine like the stars, no matter how dark things may seem, there is always a light to be found, sometimes you just have to look.

As I painted these images the elements then came into place.  I was looking at all 4 paintings laid out before me and it just hit me, I love nature and the elements, I've painted them in various different ways, it's another part of me. These images are different parts of myself and each image expressed a different side of nature, it was obvious... Earth, Fire, Wind & Water.

So as you can see, this series is very personal to me so it wasn't easy displaying it for the first time in an art show for all to see, which you can read about here.  But I did it and it was a great experience, it turned out people enjoyed my new series and not only that but some of them saw power, joy, strength and much more that I didn't expect in these images.  What do you see?

Wind

Fire

P.S. There is more to come to this series, this isn't the end.