The idea for this project began last year as I was taking daily walks on the bluff. One day I noticed what seemed to be a pair of abandoned shoes. A few days later, a second pair appeared. In one outing, there was only one shoe, and in another, a grouping of five. The paintings represent shoes discovered over a period of four months.

 

I worked from photographs taken of the shoes in exactly the positions I found them (although two pairs actually moved around for a period of three days each). And I started wondering what were the stories behind the shoes. Many were in perfectly good condition, others not so much. Were they abandoned, forgotten, or was something more nefarious going on? My imagination got the better of me and I started to think about them in the way a detective might think about a murder case—hence the white chalk outlines. Some pairs even began to take on human facial characteristics.

 

So now it’s your turn to play detective—what’s the story behind each case?