I don't often (or, really, at all) make paintings that are in any way relevant to any of my real life circumstances, but this one has been haunting me just a tiny bit so I just had to try and translate it to a canvas somehow. Putting the rest of the info under 'read more' so I can spare anyone not wanting to go through this essay lol.
Floods are one of the only extreme weather types we get in my country, and while I'm sure in XYZ nation out there it's worse and the locals have much worse to contend with etc., the knowledge of it doesn't change the fact that the rain which has hit central Europe recently has been catastrophic. As always, the worst of the floods hit by evening or night, and there's just something about the combination of darkness, wind, and lamplight, where you can hear the water everywhere but can't properly see it and you're kind of dreading what you'll wake up to in the morning, that gets to you. Doesn't help that this time, the situation did not improve the next day, and many people woke up to things having gotten drastically worse.
I included a good number of things, drawn mostly from memory, that have stuck in my mind from the floods my hometown experienced in the summer this year, as I was reminded of all of them yesterday evening when the worst of the weather hit the city I have since moved to. A good part of the city I live in has been evacuated, and I would not at all be overestimating if I said the weekend has been devastating so far.
- The trees - In lamplight, trees look kind of sort of cursed. I just find the extremely vivid green that immediately disappears into pitch blackness as soon as the light stops reaching the leaves kind of unsettling.
- The hose - This is a vaguely drawn reference to the hoses the firefighters use when pumping water out of flooded homes. Since floods inevitably entail everything getting wet, it looks very shiny and resembles a pipe.
- The plants - The stream opposite of my family's house almost always overflows during floods, but there's no measuring stick in our part of the neighbourhood that we could use to tell how high the water has risen, so we use the plants that grow alongside the stream to kind of eyeball it.
- The jackdaw - Jackdaws are extremely common in cities here and are an everyday sight. I wanted to include something that would refer to the "normal" state of things that could work in contrast with the rest of the image, and to me, jackdaws kind of represent that. Its wings are red and blue because those are the only colours you're seeing at night besides the street lamps, from the red firefighter trucks with blue lights.
- Bags of sand - If you live in an area prone to flooding, you know 'em, you love 'em.
- Traffic sign with reflective label - This is a direct reference known only to me that points to a nighttime photo of my hometown being flooded - in the photo, this one label on some traffic sign reflects brightly into the camera, and it's what's made the photo easy to recognise to me.