“Vessels”

I started work on “Vessels” in 2006 not long after completing the painting “Flow”. After a few months I pulled it from the easel to store face-against-the-wall (sometimes you just need to do this with a particular painting), and it wound up staying there for all of 2007, and some of 2008 while I dealt with the worst part of a long term, cornea-scarring injury to my right eye. When I finally put this piece back on the easel I worked at it on and off until it was finally finished in December of 2008. Sometimes a painting just comes together almost as if it’s fulfilling a mystical destiny, and occasionally it’s like pulling the teeth from a running wolf.

"Vessels", 2008, Acrylics on Canvas, 30" x 42", by David Jay Spyker

I have been entranced with waterfall images lately – by “lately” I mean the last few years – and the idea of this space surrounded by an impossibly long and meandering wall of plummeting, rushing water was something I couldn’t get out of my mind. The myriad boats swirling and bobbing about in the swelling waters of this basin symbolize us – humanity as individuals, and as a whole. Each of us is in our own boat (we are the boats), and we all drift about together in the same dangerous and beautiful flow of life.