Publish or Perish

This piece is about the need for survival, for self-expression and responsibility to the audience that comes with a creative profession. By responsibility to the audience I do not mean giving them what they want, but the realization that visual communication, or perhaps, any mass communication that relies on emotion, in its technique is no different from propaganda. The same techniques allow open sharing of ideas and manipulation of thought, except the techniques that demand the audience to question and make their own judgments... although those can be mimicked as well of course.

I'm not sure that I was actually trying to relay all that in the image. That was just kind of the bundle of stress factors going through my mind as I painted it.

Hmm... now that I think of it, not only is hair always a signifier of free thinking in my book of symbols, but it is very very possible that a ponytail is a marker of responsibility. If that doesn't make sense, look up ElfQuest comic books. In them, the ponytail is a mark of a chief. And I grew up on ElfQuest.