Be advised the coldest day follows weeks after the shortest
I completed this after spending the holidays in Salt Lake, clear and cold, with family I hadn’t seen in decades. Easily picked up where we’d left off. Nothing earth shattering, just reaffirming connections. This painting isn’t specifically about that, or anything except itself, but some of what I remember about the light made its way in.
By the way, about the titles. They’re basically just sound, if unorthodox, advice, loosely associated with the painting so titled. The first one, “Keep Going”, was in the imperative mood, and I decided to, well, keep going with that. Not just for consistency but because it makes a demand or a request. The person who receives a demand or request goes into a reflective mode where they are weighing whether or not to entertain doing what is asked, entering a decision space.
Painting is as much a series of decisions as it is anything, and viewing can be the same. I prefer this approach to assigning titles that are more passively descriptive, that prompt the viewer to assess the appropriateness of the match between the title and the titled, which is kind of beside the point, rather than having a more open ended experience.