Title: "compulsion"
The compulsion to make art can be a strong motivation. Matisse suffered a long illness which kept him flat on his back in bed. Yet he felt compelled to draw, so he attached a chalk to a long pole and drew on the ceiling of his room. The daily practice regimen is instilling a sense of compulsion in me. Just before I made this image, I was vomiting from a sudden onset of a stomach virus a couple of hours after dinner. I had not yet made an image for my daily practice, but beside the sink was this pineapple. It wasn't a long, considered time of image making, just a need to feel somewhat normal, to make an image.
There's a bittersweet irony about the subject of this image. A couple of years ago we went on a delayed 25th wedding anniversary trip to Hawaii. The last night we were there we went to a luau, and 24 hours after arriving home we both suffered from a very nasty case of food poisoning, the kind one gets from undercooked chicken. We last ate chicken at the luau, in the land of pineapples, beaches and beautiful sunshine. Last night I felt as though this pineapple was staring me in the face, a momento mori of a horrible aftermath of a lovely vacation.
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