Untitled Triptych
I painted this work in the fall of 2007. It began with an idea for a straightforward retelling of a bicycle accident that had happened to me that November, during which I broke my helmet and my left hand, but it gradually progressed into a meditation on the nature of misfortune in general. The work is deliberately ambiguous; I wanted the circumstances of the scenes in each painting to be unclear, since most of the ills that befall us seem to come out of nowhere and follow neither rhyme nor reason. Did the girl on the left slit her wrist, for example, or is she simply wearing a bracelet?
Though the people who posed for these paintings are good friends of mine, I didn’t try to render them photorealistically; I was more interested in exploring the emotions involved, for the victims and those close to them.
