Guns and Axes 18” x 24” · Carbon pencil, blackening watercolours, and inks on paper mounted to canvas · [Year 2020–2025]
This diptych presents two separate but linked paintings: one of a Springfield rifle, the other of an axe, laid side by side as if on a worn workbench or the floor of a dark shed. The Springfield rifle rests horizontally in the left panel—barrel long and straight, stock dark with use, trigger guard glinting faintly in low light. The axe occupies the right panel—head broad and heavy, edge still sharp, handle worn smooth from grip, blade catching the same muted light.
Blackening drips fall from the metal of both weapons and pool on the surface beneath them, spreading across each panel like spilled oil or blood that has dried and darkened over time. The drips connect the two objects visually—trailing from the rifle’s muzzle to the axe’s blade, linking their purpose in a single dark flow. The background is simple and shadowed: rough wood grain, faint dust, the sense of a place where tools are kept when not in use.
The work confronts the duality of these instruments: the rifle as precision and distance, the axe as raw force and proximity—both capable of ending life, protecting life, or marking territory. The blackening layers echo the accumulated weight they carry: the hands that have held them, the moments they have been raised, the silence they leave behind. They are not in action; they are at rest, yet their presence fills the canvas with quiet menace and history.
Yet in the deepest blackening, a faint gleam catches on the rifle’s sight and the axe’s edge—the quiet possibility that even tools forged for harm can be laid down, repurposed, or remembered as part of a larger story that moves toward peace.
A meditation on power, consequence, the tools we make for survival and destruction, and the enduring optimism that persists when we face the weapons we have forged—dark yet eternally hopeful in its refusal to let the steel be the final word.
Inquiries welcome for acquisition, studio view, or related works: blairaiken@raincage.com