Cleaning House With Dusty

I painted this a month or so ago, and just uploaded it. I have many pictures in my files I haven't uploaded yet. Usually if they are compositions I am still studying, I let them brew for a while in the files, until I know better what I think of them. I am always trying something new, so that's not the reason, but it's the trying something new coupled with something else hard to describe that makes me want to sit on them a while. In this case the content of a cat portrait mixed with an interior and an idea of a task brought in new elements. I think more than any of my cat portraits this is most similar to a piece I did a while back call "Arranging Flowers" which also involved the idea of a task.



I don't like to represent things too literally because I feel that is visually heavy handed. I am searching for something not quite poetic, not quite lyrical, but otherworldly and maybe literal in a different sense. As I said, it is hard to describe. I want it to be personal, intimate, and questioning and a bit challenging for the viewer. I want it to be hard edged in design, but not hard edged in story. How do you make something visually explanatory without being literal? I think you have to enter a parallel reality. Maybe it is a bit like creating a language, and I myself am still learning it - from myself, and yet I hear it in the distance and I try to speak what I hear, as if it is already out there somewhere. At the same time I am trying, I hope subtly, to teach it. So, I keep these pictures in my files for a while, and I think about them.