Walking down the track (2026)

Personal Reflection

The first thing I wanted to do was decode it. I kept zooming in, convinced that if I looked long enough the painting would reveal its secret. The octopus must mean something. The fish have to be connected to the houses. The pomegranates, the cactus, the buffalo, the little arrows, the handwritten notes… surely there’s a key. Eventually I realized that the search for a key was getting in the way. This painting feels much closer to how my own mind works than to how stories are usually told. Thoughts don’t arrive neatly. A song reminds me of childhood, childhood reminds me of a place, a place reminds me of an animal I once saw, and suddenly I’m wondering what I’ll cook for dinner. Somehow it all belongs together even if it wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. There are recurring symbols that almost invite interpretation. The fish seem suspended between water and air, as if they’re surviving in the wrong element. The octopus feels different—it reaches in every direction at once, connecting distant parts of the canvas without actually tying them together. The little houses suggest the comfort of belonging, but they also look strangely empty, almost like icons rather than homes. Then there are the pomegranates beside the words “You never know,” a quiet reminder that abundance and uncertainty often arrive together. What stayed with me most wasn’t any individual symbol but the generosity of the composition. Nothing is treated as too ordinary to deserve a place. A bottle, a cactus, a horse, a scribble, a fruit, a philosophical sentence—they all occupy the same world. It’s almost democratic. I left thinking that maybe understanding isn’t always the goal. Sometimes a painting isn’t asking us to solve it. It’s asking us to notice how eagerly we try. And perhaps that’s what Walking down the track really is: not a map of the world, but a map of attention.