Certainty (Weird Fishes)

Description

Certainty (weird fishes) is a tongue-in-cheek acrylic painting with newspaper clippings in the style of outsider art.

This painting began as a straightforward fish painting that was the other way around, the faces came later as the original painting felt kind of uninteresting to me. The faces were added in a cheeky drunken moment when I was experiencing some frustration at the lack of a fresh canvas to paint.

Plenty of quotes around about the certainty of death (and taxes). Life most certainly is absurd, a collection of seemingly random events and experiences that are supposed to amount to some meaning. I  don’t much worry about such things and this painting was meant as a light-hearted call to suck the marrow out of life, wake up, get out of the house, and live a little. Memento mori and all that.

People take different things from a picture of course, but with Certainty (weird fishes) people take it much darker than intended. One person told me she couldn’t bear to look at it, with its screaming faces and tortured fish. To me the faces are neutral, and in some cases laughing, the fish are just fish,

life indeed is absurd, and death is certain. So make the effort to live a little before it’s all over.