Spirit Guide
Spirit Guide, 2018. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 20" x 30".
Spirit Guide has a bit of a supernatural element to it, but it's also very down-to-earth.
In one way it can be read as the duality of nature vs. culture; the barefoot guide connected to the heavens, leading the hard-edged creative soul through the earthly realm. (They are paradoxically one and the same, directly physically connected, and share the same face under the layers of makeup and artifice).
They can also be seen as aspects of the same person, the one blending into the other, the spiritual and the material (the "guide" having some slightly transparent, ethereal qualities.
I thought of my own youth as I created it, the process of growing up being like shedding off layers of ideological and physical artifices.
David Bowie once described the process of aging as being one in which you become the person you were meant to be all along. I feel that is very true indeed.