Welcome Back Bucket

This painting has been something of a touchstone for me these past few months. It is something that happened in the middle of one of those runs of paintings where I stopped thinking about what I was doing because the production became so regular and honestly I though this was about 2/3 done, but there was something about it that made me stop.

The composition is loose; the elements go together but they don't really fit together. There is an economy of material that is not common in my current line of paintings; the raw canvas background features prominently. Everything is visible, and nothing is completely obscured, at least nothing much. All these factors combined give this painting a vulnerable sort of feeling. Like I got caught sunbathing while idly picking my nose.

The text in brown running from top to bottom on the left side of the painting is the phrase "welcome back bucket" repeated three or four times. I listen to a Podcast sometimes called "How Did This Get Played" which is about video games. Usually bad or weird video games. One of the episodes was about a game where the premise was something like the moon had caused everything on the Earth to go kablooey in a metaphysical sense and the game was about bringing back the concepts of things back to the Earth. So at a certain point in the game you might bring back the concept of "Bucket" and the congratulatory phrase "Welcome Back Bucket!" would flash across the screen.

This is deeply troubling. If our human civilization were annihilated, would the concept of Bucket continue to exist? If there is no mind to conceive of Bucket, is it still a concept? And then, if the concept does disappear, when a mind once again conceives of Bucket, is it a continuation, or a whole new thing?

Lot's of problems. None of them meaningful. I love this painting. It makes me want to be better at looking at paintings.