F. Scott Hess

Why Are We Here? is related to a large painting I am planning, but the piece of it that this painting represents has already morphed into something else. This piece is an exploration of a vision of a figure walking into a landscape, where the painting Mud Riot would be on his right, and Louie Takes Flight on his left. Clearly, some changes took place!

I’d envisioned a number of people in the procession, all of them somehow carrying something that would relate to the shovel in the protagonist’s hand. A mother with a dead child (bury grief), a sapling (plant hope), a bucket (dig for water), but the urgency of those metaphors just sort of evaporated as I worked on the image. Something a little more free-form came into play, and the piece took off in its own direction.