The Old, The New and the Cynic

Sometimes, I think we're overly concerned with what other people think of us. And I think that's what, this painting turned out to be about, uh, the old, the new and the cynic. Um, it's a little bit hard for me to tell whether the Sinek is myself criticizing my own work, or if I'm worried about what other people think or a little bit of both. Um, we sort of see in this picture, the, um, the flower, again, that I've repeated a few times here in a different angle facing a different way.

The addition of kind of a, um, a dried, perhaps dead version of the flower, uh, with some leaves that have fallen on the ground, but, you know, stuffed into a jar with these materials that, you know, I would use to create, and the difference in the way that those, um, flowers, uh, are rendered versus the very flat, um, uh, pop art sort of materials.

I think I probably very much had in mind, um, some of the Roy Lichtenstein, still life type of pitchers and, and smashed those different elements together. Um, but here, you know, it's a, it's a picture painted, um, essentially with another picture of a painting within it, with someone looking on, um, instead of having a bit of a, a bit of a snigger at, at my own, my own painting, um, you know, I think one of the reasons I probably left quite a large portion of this crate, um, raw around the painting is, is to kind of, I think LIBOR as, um, as something where, you know, you can be sort of unfinished, I think, in this, this world, because we, you know, might have a consideration about what someone else thinks of us.

And we either don't follow through with something because we're worried about that.

Or, you know, we incomplete, you know, we leave, uh, uh, uh, an activity incomplete because, you know, somewhere along the way, you know, we take some garbage advice from someone else who might be important in our lives, but, um, you know, they're viewing that through, through often what, what they know about the world or what they think is, is best based on their own experiences. And as we kind of, um, take on board that it leaves us a bit, um, unable to kind of back our own decisions.

Um, you know, this is something that probably, um, I talk about a lot with people as a career development practitioner. Um, and then, you know, here is sort of, I guess, me reflecting on some of those concepts, uh, and them coming to life in this painting. Um, you know, it, it does kind of connect back again to the idea that I had originally for all of these works about the way that, that outside forces, particularly advertising and marketing, um, impacted our own, why that we sort of made decisions and formed identity and those types of things.

And, and while I kind of destroyed all of those paintings, this idea is quite transferable in terms of how we view ourselves based on a different influence, you know, influence of, of sometimes people we know, and, and often people we don't even know, you know, we'd see it sort of seem to value the opinion of strangers in a completely unqualified way, um, for some reason, and, and, you know, we, don't really, in a lot of, a lot of ways, we don't really know why we do that.

You know, we, we value the opinion of a stranger that, um, we don't know whether they have any expertise, you know, they might say they do, but they probably don't. And it's, yeah, it's, it's that part of it, I think is quite interesting to me and you know, how these voices get into our heads and how we, um, protect ourselves from, you know, protect ourselves from those voices that, you know, are discouraging that often, you know, often may not even be real.

We're kind of just super imposing them within ourselves based on, on an expectation of the way that some people will behave or react or judge us.