This piece is based loosely on a friend of mine who sat for it initially, but I wasn’t able to finish it in time and she had to go. So it doesn’t really look like her and most of it is made up.
I am pleased with her hands, the way they sit with such delicacy across her, perfect and human. There is a half-smile on her lips, as if she were about to laugh, but there is also a certain sense of the melancholic to her. This is common to pretty much all of my works to date.
The idea of light and dark, yin and yang, in the language of the Dao – where there is good there is bad, heat there is cold. In my experience this has proven to be the case not in the spiritual sense (or in karma, which doesn’t really work if you take reincarnation out of the picture,) but in everything that we do within the bounds of the material world.
I am about as much of an atheist as a person can be (this doesn’t mean that I do not respect the beliefs of others!)
If the idea of an afterlife is removed from the equation, then the moments, the time that we have, is not lessened in value. In an absolute sense, what we have, this life – each week day hour minute second is in actuality made infinitely more precious. It must mean more to us, because this is all that we have.
It means also that the responsibility for living well, for living to the hilt with everything within us lies with us, in our hearts and minds. With our love, our strength, the veracity and purity of our actions.

But it is also in some ways a bleak way of looking at the world. Because to me, these moments must end. They must.

So this piece, as almost every one of my others, has this attempt at beauty, and it has an undercurrent, a swelling, of sorrow.

Because life is beautiful. And because life is also sad.

Paul.