Weathered trophy
The word trophy means something like the symbol of a won battle. It makes sense on a number of levels; in fact, this is often how I feel when I manage to put a good day's work into a canvas in the studio.
I began my work on the painting here back in the spring of 2021, when a friend who had bought another painting from me gave me the masonite slab.
The idea I went with was to give my own take on a roaring deer, which then ended up being a trophy. However, getting the right expression out in the picture turned out to be significantly more challenging than I had first thought.
I think this is often the case: I have a fairly accurate idea of exactly the expression I want to convey, but the canvas and the colors seem to resist. As if the picture has a will of its own, and every time I try to add something, I also provoke something else.
Close-ups of the brown, purple and orange shaded rust.
The structure I painstakingly built up in rusty wire and concrete, I for the most part had to remove again. Only the negative impression remains. To emphasize the raw and weathered expression I chose to mount the picture with a tarnished floating frame.