Thoughts on Violence

"Wrestlers," oil on paper, 4" x 6", 2012

i painted these wrestlers after

the sandy hook shooting because

i liked their faces and the way

they held each other up. i painted

from a picture i took with my phone

during a movie. in the movie they

were brothers but they had to fight

each other for some stupid reason.

they pounded each other's faces into

the ground and cried. 

roland barthes says that wrestling

is not a sadistic spectacle, it is 

an intelligible spectacle. we don't just want

to see pain, we want to see why pain

happens, the whole equation laid out.

i see one brother holding the other brother's 

arm behind his back in a terrible

bone-twisting way and my body thinks

about what i could do to my own

brother, and under what circumstances.

could i twist his arm like that? could i let go?

what would it feel like to be hit there,

and with that hand?

his suffering is open and i can enter it.

we can collaborate.

like falling in love with you so deeply that

i fall in love with your love for another. 

someone at work after sandy hook

said, "i'm not surprised," 

and i thought, no, we are always

surprised by pain. the next wave

feels the same as the last 

but is brand new. 

i have a lot of dreams

about people i love dying

and they always make me cry

but i feel them so deeply that they must

be more good than bad when all things

are finished.

last week i painted a sad old woman in a 

rocking chair. she didn't want to be happy.

i gave her the love of my labor.

when i painted the wrestlers i almost fixed

their bloody faces with my brush. 

but all of us knew 

it was not my place.

"Wrestlers," detail