tht verdeling
this painting is an inside joke with myself. after having come back to lithuania from working in the netherlands for two years, i had a period where i felt i needed to reconnect with nature. shake off the remnants of energetic warehouse dust sticking to me.
i did spend a lot of time in nature. rebuilt the connection. nature is god to me. the divine, the creator. well, did you ever notice god’s sense of humor? i can’t explain it but that was one of the main things i noticed then. everything seemed particularly funny—and i promise i was staying sober.
a childlike rediscovering of my connection happened that summer, and i picked up my paintbrushes, picked up oil stick, crayons. i wanted more nature in my artworks, and i was beginning to adopt a lighthearted outlook on life, relearning it from nature around me.
the punchline of this piece is the soil from which the chuckling flower stems.
when working in a warehouse, sometimes a picker will be given a roll of stickers marked ‘tht verdeling’, meaning something like ‘best before date distribution’. then you’d have to go on your way collecting small orders that were close to their expiration date, or something. i saved some of those stickers, and brought them with me. a souvenir, maybe.
or art.
i stuck them to the canvas, buried them in soil, that allowed for the flower to grow. pronouncing that period of my life as deceased. and as all dead things—the hardship is also fertilizer. i thought that was a very clever play on meaning.
the stickers are also peeling now slightly, giving the artwork dimension and signaling to me about a time that is now part of the past. that’s something i really like about this piece too.
