Calgary [ 36 ” x 48 ” ]· Carbon pencil and blackening watercolors made from captured industrial carbon, with inks on paper mounted to canvas · [ 2019–2025 ]
The mask of transition and the ache of leaving home.
This painting returns to Calgary as a place of stark contrast and quiet memory. The city skyline rises sharp against a wide prairie sky, the Calgary Tower glinting in cold light while the background stretches into shadowed foothills and open land. No river appears; instead, the ground is cracked and darkened, blackening drips spreading from the base of the buildings outward like spilled ink or oil, staining the soil and fading the horizon.
The old and new buildings stand low and unyielding, symbols of ambition and progress, my homes balcony in the shadow of the mask, the blackening layers creep upward from the earth, pooling at their foundations and softening their edges. The foothills in the distance remain firm, enduring beneath the city's reach, their lines muted by shadow but unbroken.
No figures appear, but the painting feels lived-in: the residue of walks in the cold air, moments of reflection made in the open space between urban and wild, the sense of a city that is both destination and passage. The blackening drips echo the gradual encroachment—development pressing against the land, change seeping into what was once open and untouched—yet the prairie keeps holding, the skyline keeps reaching. The artist’s former home sits in the center of the composition, to the right of the mask, in the background.
The work is a meditation on place as intersection: where prairie meets city, where past meets future, where the individual stands at the edge of what is built and what remains. In the deepest blackening, a faint gleam reflects off a single tower window—the quiet possibility that even in the shadow of progress, something open, resilient, and untamed can still endure.
A meditation on transition, memory, the cost of growth, and the enduring optimism that persists when we face the skyline we have raised—dark yet eternally hopeful in its refusal to let the oil rich land be fully covered.
Studio view, or related works: blairaiken@raincage.com
Inspiration & Personal Connection
This painting draws inspiration from Egon Schiele’s *House with Laundry* (1914). Schiele’s stark, angular depiction of the building — with its sharp lines, distorted perspective, and the simple laundry hanging like flags of everyday life — has always stayed with me. He painted ordinary structures as if they carried hidden psychological weight, turning the familiar into something quietly unsettling.
In my version, the house in Calgary becomes a deeply personal marker. It stands as a symbol of transition — the place where I made the decision to leave and return to Charleston, a quiet crossroads in my own journey of life, identity, and renewal. The blackening layers trace the slow accumulation of memory, displacement, and the emotional weight of choosing to move forward while carrying the past with me.
Through this work, I explore how the places we live in shape us, how they can serve as both anchors and thresholds, and how even the most ordinary house can become a silent witness to profound personal change.
Yet even in this moment of transition and quiet unease, a faint gleam persists — a quiet reminder that every departure carries within it the possibility of return, growth, and a new sense of home.
Studio view, or related works: blairaiken@raincage.com
Dark yet hopeful.
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Egon Schiele’s *House with Laundry* (1914).