"The Red Line"

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Mixed Media on Canvas

By Taylor Kirch

2022

 

Into the liminal spaces between life and the scars left by both. With bold, textured strokes of black and gray contrasted by visceral streaks of red, each section is meant to evokes the rawness of injury and the fragility of existence. The red cuts through the canvas with violent precision, like wounds that refuse to heal, dividing the composition into fragmented realms.

 

The layered grays and blacks create a dense, suffocating atmosphere, mirroring the weight of grief, memory, and entropy. Loss leaves marks not only on the body but on the spaces we inhabit, the memories we carry, and the paths we tread.

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With a history of loss and injury, the painting seeks to reflect all that I have felt. The injuries of my own making, and the world's inevitable movement toward entropy and death. It's confusing, but somehow the visceral moment of injury or death brings us out of that chaos into some more tangible. It recognizes our own mortality and brings that to the surface.

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A year ago I lost a friend of mine who was a brilliant artist. He saved my life, unknowingly. I was walking down the street, miserably depressed, and he saw me... yelled out "Hey! What are you doing? It's freezing!". Meanwhile he was outside smoking a cigarette. In the cold. Like me. So, he and his girlfriend gave me a tour of the studio. His infectious laugh, his attitude, positivity - even though he suffered with epilepsy - was contagious. I realized then that there was something more I could do with myself, that if he could dive into his art as a way of showing the world his true soul, that I could live another day to see the majesty in it.