The Hidden Meanings Behind Symbolic Paintings

I never planned to explain my paintings. I would rather someone stand in front of one and feel something before they know why. But people ask me all the time what the symbols mean, so here is the honest version.

A symbolic painting is just a painting saying two things at once. There is the thing you see, and there is the thing it is actually about. I paint the first one well so you will stay long enough to find the second.

Take one of mine, Secrets of a Desert Dweller. On the surface it is a desert tortoise crossing a wide, empty landscape. But look at his shell and there is an entire western town built into it. Every building, every road, every place he has ever been, riding on his back while he keeps walking. I did not paint him to be clever. I painted him because that is how a life actually feels by a certain age. You are carrying all of it, and you keep going anyway.

Or Time Stands Still. You never see her face. That is on purpose, because I want you to see your own. Look closely and she is holding a little necklace with a cross on it, just by one finger, barely. She came through whatever she came through and did not let that one thing go. Of everything in that painting, that is the part I care about most.

That is what a symbol does. It gives a feeling somewhere to live so you can stand there and look at it.

Sometimes the meaning is not in the picture at all. It is in what the painting is made of. In my Sedona Earth work there is real ground from the desert worked right into the surface. Not a picture of the place, the place itself, in the paint.

Here is the part I will not do. I am not going to hand you the whole meaning and call it finished. Half of what a painting means, you bring with you. I have had two people stand in front of the same piece and tell me two completely different stories about it, and both were right. That is not me being coy. That is the point.

So if you want art that is actually about something, trust the piece that keeps pulling your eye back after the first look. That tug is you recognizing something. Go find out what it is.

When I finish a new piece, I tell the story behind it first inside my Collector's Circle, in my own words. That is the door if you want in.

Dani