Someone Else
Larry Thompson • Oil on panel
Artist’s statement: “One of the great things I find when reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird again are the multiple layers of narratives at work. In thinking of this piece, I thought of images that crop up while reading through the narratives. There is the obvious racial unrest of the time balanced with a simple love story of a daughter admiring her father. I chose the image of black and white children’s shoes to metaphorically represent many of the themes in Harper Lee’s book, juxtaposed with fragments of the text that hit upon the universal ideas found in the book. Lee often writes through her characters of not really knowing someone until one has walked around in another’s shoes. Whether it is race, gender or some other issue, having empathy for another is key to understanding. In this work, I continue a common pattern in my work of layering an image with text, trying to find that visual balance and tension between space and flatness, while using image and text fragments to tell part of the story.”