Without A Dove - A4 Oil Pastel on Cartridge Paper - Sealed

Without A Dove - A4 Oil Pastel on Cartridge Paper - Sealed

This is my favourite piece that I've made so far. For the longest time I couldn't figure out what I had made and why it felt so resonant. To all other eyes it just looked like a simple scribble. Like something a child could do. But it felt like something to me. It felt like....someone.

And then it hit me. When I was young I saw a painting of a person that inrtigued me. I didn't know that I was intersex yet, but I had already been through several different gender identities myself but the time I was 12, which was around the time I saw this painting.

It showed a character who's gender I couldn't discern.

The character, a child, holding a dove, seemed to have a shaved head, but they were also wearing a long blue dress. They had boyish features, with a feminine stance. I couldn't tell if their hair was in fact shaved short, or just tied back in a tight ponytail.

The dress...feminine....the blue...masculine - the ball, boyish, the dove, girly.

Being colourblind I didn't realise the character's red/ginger hair but knowing that now also feels significant as intersex people and red headed people share a percentage of the population (1.7% estimated)

When I found out the title of the painting, as a teenager, 'child with dove' - it still didn't shed light on the gender of the child. Though most people agree it's a young girl, the young gender fluid child in me connected with something non binary in that painting, and to this day I still do.

On top of all this, a sense of sadness and isolation eminates from the child that makes me think of my own experiences with having AUDHD, and the simple, flat, almost abstracted colours and shapes combined with the thick rough brushstrokes felt symbolic of my alternative view of the world.

Of course, I couldn't put all this into words at the time. I just knew it made my heart ache and my brain feel alive and numb at the same time - like I'd eaten a sour sweet and my eyes were rolling and my gums were throbbing and my throat was closing up. And at this time in my life, I copied this painting and I fell in love with my own copy of it! I felt like in some way this child with dove, was the child I had only recently been.

And when I drew this piece - I realised - it's that same child again. Without the dove, or the ball this time. But with that same shaved head (I decided it was shaved in the end) and the same gender ambiguous features, the melancholic sense of sadness or isolation, the swirling flat colours, the simple and unusual perspective.

And again, I am in love with a sense of my self in this piece. With the autistic, adhd, intersex, non binary child in me - who had none of those words, but still showed up as all those things.

So I have placed this piece at £150.00 because I want to know that the person who buys it really wants it and really connects with it in the way that I do. I want the buyer to see themsleves in it, and to fall in love. In love with the child that they were, who was so worthy of being loved, but who perhaps had no idea of this at the time.