dfspaintings

The stockjoker takes stock. This picture was painted as a commentary on the financial market crash of 2008. It depicts the uneasy reflection of a financial market speculator who is having serious doubts about the morality and seriousness of what he does in the aftermath of the crisis. He sees himself - in his own day-dream at least - as a sad clown; it was all once such a lot of fun but now, with the consequences, the joke has gone sour. Perhaps he has just lost a fortune, we don't know. The hard geometry of the background cityscape alludes to both the detached coldness of the world in which the speculator operates and the consequences that the speculator's actions might have. This is a picture for all time but was inspired by speculative excess and the resulting 2008 financial crisis.  The canvas surface is textured to accentuate the grainy hardness of the scene.