“Dark Love” 12 x 12 canvas
This is one of my ‘older’ paintings. It was done during the height of my stint as a 911 dispatcher on midnights. I was working a 1 am to 11 am shift. Trying to sleep in the afternoon was impossible. I was getting maybe 4 hours of solid sleep a night. I was also having work related recurring dreams. Always involving car stops and radio traffic. I was either having trouble hearing an officer on a car stop, or the officer couldn’t hear me. Shots fired. Officer down. And the rest was static or garbled.
The dreams would get me amped and carry over in to my shift where I just felt hyper vigilant all the time.
So this painting along with a few others was my attempt at working through that dream. I used deep red and blue to capture the patrol car lights in the dark. Some yellow for street lamps that also glows in the dark. Some grey and periwinkle to get that concrete jungle feel. Style wise it was from a period where I was using a lot of inks over acrylics. I painted the canvas as it lay flat on a table that wasn’t quite level so the inks would slowly swirl and sway one direction.
I used the title ‘Dark Love’ because it captured to me that dilemma as a dispatcher working the radio. I loved being the channel. I preferred it way more over talking to citizens and taking 911 calls. I loved the adrenaline rush of a pursuit or foot chase. And I was great at doing my job. That said, a dispatcher knows when it is ‘exciting’ for them, that means something has to go wrong out there. So for me at least, there’s kind of a guilt. Or guilty pleasure aspect to it. And all in all, you do love protecting the men and women in the field.
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