30 x 48 in.

Acrylic on stretched canvas.


ORIGINAL SOLD

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This painting was inspired by watching my dad play four-wall handball growing up. A "kill shot" was a unique moment when someone hit the ball at the perfect angle and with enough force to cause the ball to roll rather than bounce off the back wall. It was impossible to return. It was impressive to watch, especially since they were making this happen by smacking this hard, little ball with the palms of their hands. I didn't know what a kill shot felt like in handball, but I did know the feeling of a sweet spot, hitting the ball in racquetball. It was the moment when the ball fires off the strings with seemingly magnified speed, in the exact trajectory I imagined.

I made this painting during our time in Savannah, Georgia when we had to evacuate a couple years in a row for hurricanes. At home, and then later in a hotel, we would obsess over the little icon on the news reports that represented the eye of the storm: a little red circle with two, curved blades. A change in one degree toward or away from the coast would inform us about whether we’d have to pick up and evacuate in the next three hours, and whether our home would stand in the storm’s path. Whether a town was on one side or the other of the rotating bands could mean whether it would flood or not. So much information was to be gleaned from the trajectory of that little graphic, and it was constantly moving.

Though I may have drawn inspiration from handball and storm graphics, I also kept imagining the little oblong circle in this painting as our planet. The flat blue of the handball in this painting seems eccentric, the way our planet's colors sometimes strike me as arbitrary and garish against the stark black of space. As weird as those colors are, they represent the unique suitability of our environment to us. Swapping the ball for our planet, I started to see it as the Earth in the imminent event of getting nailed. Not the planet, which will go on for millions of years without us - but the delicate suitability of it to us. It's not the awesome forces of nature I see coming to get us, in neon orange, yellow and black - but our own 80's-style engineered dilemma: the mother of kill shots.