Aloysius Sees The Light

Original artwork. Acrylic paint on canvas. Not wonky like this image! (will take some better photos soon). Is also a greener shade of blue than appears here.

“Aloysius Sees The Light” is my first tangible (non-digital) artwork in 25 years.
It’s quite the labour of love, quite weird, quite profound and not quite this shade of blue (there’s more green in it than this shows but taking accurate photos of real paintings is, apparently, kind of hard. Might have to get a pro in to sort that).

The scene describes the moment where the character in the work, Aloysius, formerly head-down, obsessing about his internal world, which as you can see on the desk in front of him, is dark and complicated, suddenly looks up and is surprised to “see the light”. The light takes his breath away (represented by the butterfly) and his mind finally cracks open as the light (represented by the little yellow rectangles in his head) merge with the serious scenarios he was previously obsessing about.

The painting means a lot to me as I personally live with and through a repeating cycle of becoming drawn into a dark internal world, full of (needless) worry, stress and anxiety, only to emerge from these dark times full again with the wonder and joy of life. When the light comes calling on me, often in meditation, but sometimes just when I am looking into my children’s faces or simply walking the dog, the hours, days, weeks and months that I sometimes spend drawn into my own darkness seem incomprehensible to me, as I return to the childlike and happy-go-lucky state that I am blessed to sometimes bounce about our planet in.

(A longer version of the story behind this work can be found here http://rebelzen.com/2018/02/new-painting-aloysius-sees-light/ )