Real Spirit Orbs Painting

This piece is a both a serious take on ghosts, while at the same time it is a bit of a playful piece. While I've had interactions within a haunted house (read my bio and "One To Watch"), I am very skeptical of the idea of "spirit orbs". And I think its important not to take myself too seriously. I was inspired by this piece while watching ghost hunting shows while I was younger. The idea of spirit orbs captured on camera, to me, is a hoax, as they are 99% (maybe 100%) of the time dust, or bugs. They are something that the flash of the camera is bouncing off of, creating an "orb" shape because of the aperture of the camera lens. Therefore, while painting this graveyard scene, and naming the piece "Real Spirit Orbs" I'm playing off of the hoax itself. Clearly, this is an image of a graveyard, with definitive spray paint marks. They are not spirits, they are physical sprayed marks. In the corner of the piece, there is a pink sticky note painted, in an attempted to create a Tromp-l'oeil affect. On the sticky note, there is an image of a ghost. As if the creator of this image has stuck this to the painting as a reminder of what is there, or what to paint, or of what is truly going on. As much as the piece is a playful piece, its seriousness still resides in the fact that people are still very interested in the idea of spirits and there is a hope for something beyond the material/everyday. This piece was displayed at my recent MFA Thesis Exhibition in 2017 entitled "Encounters With the Spectral".