Winter Solstice

2017
21 x 30in 
acrylic on masonite

The notion of dualities is something I come back to quite frequently in my work. Of course, life is never as cut and dried as either ‘this’ or ‘that’, but I do think that the daily pursuit of some sort of life balance, pivots on dualities and choices, at least it does for me. I try to build enough ambiguity into my images to leave enough unresolved for the viewer to bring their own subjectivity to whatever image their looking at.

This painting took me 30 years to tackle, because there were a number of moral issues I had to come to terms with, regarding my time as a dairy and beef farmer. I took the lives of the animals I raised very seriously, and  the inevitability of sick animals with its inherent anxiety for the wellbeing of the animal weighed heavily on me. Should I be doing this in the first place? What can I do to nurse this animal back to health?  Sometimes, in spite of my best efforts, the animal succumbed to disease, especially in the winter, when pneumonia was more prevalent.

Winter solstice is a time of duality for me, passing through the dark threshold of long nights and emerging, the next morning, into the time when daylight starts creeping back to our part of the world. The sick calf in the pen below me is also going through it’s own dark night, and all I can do is make sure it has a heat lamp to keep warm. It’s life literally hangs by the thread of the cord keeping the heat lamp on. In times like this, there tends to be a feeling of isolation, that I alone was responsible for this.  It’s just me and my sick calf on this the longest of winter nights. I wanted to paint myself in a position of extreme concern, hands clasped in hope. The hood of my coat obscures my face and casts a shadow over my eyes, an angel of mercy or of death.