BETRAYAL (Bug 11)

20x20"
oil on canvas
sold

Bugs as a narrative. Perhaps that's where the bug series is taking me. Who knows? How many of us have felt the stinging pain of betrayal at the hands of someone we trusted? It's part of life, of emotional growth, of learning that we should give only as much as we are prepared to lose and to know in the end we can never really lose anyone or anything. That was serious, can't catch your breath or swallow a morsel pain. I put that pain in a part of my brain that's reserved only for life's most overwhelming and unspeakable events, especially when I was younger. And yet, in hindsight, those unbearable moments prepared me for the love and trust I enjoy today. And in the end, it was never about who or what we lost, but how much we felt diminished by their absence, and that we can fix.

The lady in the foreground may be a high school girl seeing her BFF engrossed in an animated conversation with her nemesis, or perhaps a suspicious housewife tracking her philandering husbands footsteps during his lunch hour to finally find him canoodling with his administrative assistant. Or even a besotted, insecure middle-aged man mistaking a casual conversation between his wife and best friend as more than it is. Or, they could just be three ladybugs, painted on a stark white canvas.