Hiraeth

🛼 https://youtu.be/oqrOzkl_3g4?si=z4rC60MU4xfL0i-k

The painting is about the hidden cost of beauty, endurance, and absence. The enormous blue-gray woman sits curled up in a warm orange room, her eyes open but lowered, with that cold sadness visible beneath them. That creates an interesting contradiction: physically, she dominates the room; emotionally, she seems overwhelmed by it. Around her is a world that looks alive and comforting—the orange wallpaper scattered with countless red seed-like shapes, the red chair, the little table, the flowers, and the sunny home—but she seems completely disconnected from that warmth. The white gladiolus can suggest innocence, remembrance, mourning, dignity, or strength; the red anemone can evoke fragile love, grief, pain, and transience; and the sunny home can represent belonging, safety, or a home that feels distant or inaccessible. The tiny scale of these paintings compared with her enormous body makes them feel like little preserved fragments of things she longs for or has lost. Then there is the empty red chair, which looks like a place meant for another person or for comfort, but remains vacant, and beside it the single empty coffee cup, which feels like evidence that someone—or some shared routine—was once there and is no longer. The cup being empty is important because it implies something has already been consumed: something existed and is now gone. Meanwhile, her blood-soaked ballet shoes introduce another kind of absence: the gap between what something looks like and what it actually costs. Ballet shoes are delicate, graceful, and beautiful, but the blood bleeding through them reveals pain underneath the performance. She has literally been standing on suffering. Her body is huge enough to fill the room, yet she looks powerless, suggesting that physical presence doesn’t equal emotional strength. The warm orange environment can therefore represent the world as it appears from the outside—beautiful, ordinary, full of home and comfort—while her blue body represents what is happening underneath. The red marks on the wallpaper might become thoughts, memories, anxiety, or pain constantly surrounding her, while the blood on her shoes makes the red feel more personal: the pain isn’t only in the room; it has come from her own body. Ultimately, the painting feels to me like a portrait of someone who has endured too much while trying to remain beautiful, graceful, functional, or composed. She hasn’t simply lost someone or something; she may have lost part of herself in the process of holding everything together. And that’s what makes the empty chair, empty cup, sunny home, delicate flowers, and bloodied ballet shoes work so powerfully together: everything beautiful in the painting contains some suggestion of pain, absence, or sacrifice underneath it.

I asked chatty to interpret my painting and it’s symbolism :»