The Artist and Laurie

Full title: The Artist and Laurie at Crescent Beach, December 2006
Medium: Acrylic

Well, I'm back in Vancouver again, and wouldn't you know it? Suddenly my ability to paint, which has been largely dormant for two months, is back in action. I guess this city really does inspire me.

This is based on a photograph of me and Laurie which was taken back in 2006, during my first visit to Vancouver. This is the first photo of the two of us together. The concept is one I've been toying with for a few months, waiting to get back here to work on it. I wanted to recreate a staged photo, which oftentimes loses its depth of personality because it's staged, and replace the heads with symbols to show the internal consciousness hidden beneath the external poses and smiles. Both of these symbols have appeared in previous paintings of mine: my symbol is the GO sign in The Interpretation of Signals Has Never Been a Strength of Mine, which represents my Asperger's, and Laurie's is an ouroboros, to which I alluded in The Ouroboros Complex as a metaphor for her OCD. In a way, this is the best image I could think of for why the two of us are such good friends; as shown here, we can really relate to each other because we've both had to struggle with our own irrational compulsions.