Portrait 6 Painting

I paint because I find it the best media to tell stories. This new series of paintings is based on the novel 'The Wall' by Marlen Haushofer. The elements in my paintings are ideas taken from Haushofer and processed until I get a brand new, fresh visual concept. The narrative in my work is bouncing between nature, feminism, fear and utopia (understanding utopia as personal inner-freedom) creating a mosaic of linked ideas building up the story. I use elements like matches (connected to The Wall when a woman is trapped in the Austrian mountains and is counting matches left as her life depends on it), a cat as an idea of unconditional love and support, the cow as someone to admire, and the fire as the beginning of human domination of the earth. However, this visual idea of the fire has other connotations that will be covered in planned paintings of this series. The open/broken lines of a football pitch indicate the idea of lost rules and a cracked glass of water is unsettling. Like in nature, my paintings are showing the fragility of order and the eruption of chaos in one frame. The question that emerges is 'Where is our place in nature and where is our inner place?'.