“Checkmate”
Acrylic painting
This was done as an independent study in high school. I did an entire series with ravens. This particular piece was me experimenting with surrealism. The inspiration for this piece centers around relationships I had in high school. There was a particular person who seemed to try and sully my relationships while pretending to be my friend. The stray rose petals represent those relationships and the green demon weaving in and out of a checkerboard represent the interloper. He doesn’t move on the same dimension. He’s too tricky for that. The melting raven was definitely influenced by Salvador Dali’s piece “The Persistence of Memory”. This imagery represents myself guarding one of my relationships, but by trying SO hard to deflect my “enemy”, I ended up overwhelming and somewhat smothering my interest.
