‘Bitter Acid’ (Beyond the surface)
FOR SALE – at present in exhibition – see www.painexhibit.com
Acrylic on Canvas, 120cm x 120cm
From my ‘Pain’ series
Arthritic pain has affected me for most of my life – like a living being crawling over my bones and tissues, invading my body, throwing out it’s tentacles to envelop me. This particular nasty creature lives over my upper spine and affects my upper back, neck, shoulders, arms and hands.
In ‘Bitter Acid’ I have portrayed how I perceive this creature and the pain and difficulty he causes. The gold and red depict me, my flesh and the pain I am in. I am covered with this acidic creature and caught in its painful net.
This is one of a series of four paintings using colour and abstraction to portray how I perceive my pain and it has proved to be very cathartic to spend time analysing pain and transforming it into paint.
JULIE MEESE ARBSA - Fine Art - Graphite drawings & Oil paintings 
I really get the sense of the way pain spreads out and occludes your ability to focus on things. I also get a sense of blood pounding (from the background). The centre motif makes me think of things biological, like nerves and viruses.
This work shares several characteristics with the previous piece; in particular the focal spot, which sits just off-centre. It’s as if there’s always an epicentre that can translocate – a temporal dimension.
There’s also a recursive facet to this piece; the germ feeding back into itself, resulting in a cascading affect.