Bleeding Borders

Bleeding Borders" watercolor and pen on canvas. 24x36 in. Commissioned by Rev. Chip Rousch for the First Unitarian Church of South Bend.

This piece was my first attempt at painting a large scale abstract image. The heart of this piece is invariably political and humanitarian. I started this painting over the summer in the midst of heated debates on immigration policy. I began to ponder how countries on maps are divided rarely by geographical indicators such as mountains, rivers, and seas. On the contrary, they are separated merely by lines drawn by a human hand on a piece of paper. So I set out to do the same thing with my own imaginary map. In this painting I started out with organic, unconstrained blobs and drizzles of watercolor which bleed naturally into each other, creating subtle and unpredictable color gradations. I then outlined each gradation with a pen, arbitrarily deciding which sections should be separate from each other. Even after being contained by pen, the groupings of color cannot be separated from each other completely. You can still see where one color bleeds into the next. You can still see the drizzles I attempted to contain with pen still cross the border of another mass of color than where it initially came from. Basically what I mean by this piece is to illustrate the superficiality of human constructed borders which attempt to isolate individual pieces from a collective whole.