“So much confusion When autumn comes around…”
That line alone could be the thesis of this piece. My October Symphony lives in that unsettled space where seasons shift, certainty erodes, and memory starts editing itself. Inspired directly by the Pet Shop Boys’ song, this work explores the quiet dissonance between what we believed, what we lived, and what time insists on rewriting.
The surface tells the story first. Warm, weathered tones—like coffee-stained paper and tea-soaked pages—move across the canvas in layers of crackle, abrasion, and softened edges. These are not clean transitions, they’re hesitant, uneven, much like October itself. Metallic mica and pigment anchor the lower portion of the piece, lending weight and gravity, as if holding everything in place while the rest quietly questions its own stability.
Beneath encaustic wax, vintage dictionary pages define love, real, and realism—words that feel solid until you actually try to live inside them. The wax blurs the text just enough to suggest doubt, echoing the lyric:
“How to smile behind a frown? It’s hard to settle down.”
Here, language becomes unreliable. Definitions soften. Meaning slips.
At the center, raised from the surface like a pause in the music, is a small reliquary—lifted an inch and a half forward, asking to be noticed. Beneath resin sits a quiet collage and a watchmaker’s glass tube filled with mechanical remnants. Time, dissected and preserved. Motion, stopped. A physical response to the question that repeats throughout the song:
“Shall I rewrite or revise my October symphony?”
This piece is not about revolution in the loud, heroic sense. It’s about the slower, more personal shift the lyrics hint at—“from revolution to revelation.” The realization that some parades are canceled, some victories never happened the way we remember, and that bravery often looks like continuing anyway.
The textures hold that tension. Corrugated elements feel worn but deliberate. Cracks suggest history rather than damage. Nothing here is pristine—and that’s the point. Like October, this work exists in the in-between: reflective but unresolved, nostalgic without being sentimental, melancholic without collapsing into despair.
“So we’re all drinking as leaves fall to the ground…”
There’s a quiet acceptance embedded in the palette and materials—a recognition that time moves forward whether we’re ready or not. This is a piece you don’t just look at; you sink into it. The longer you stay, the more it reveals—small shifts in surface, half-hidden words, the subtle weight of memory settling in.
My October Symphony is about standing in that moment of pause and asking yourself what gets rewritten, what gets remembered, and what finally becomes clear. Perhaps that’s the true revelation.
SIZE: 24" x 36" x 2" (61cm x 91.5cm x 5cm)
Special Care for Encaustic Artwork... Encaustic artwork is created with a combination of beeswax (note for those who are allergic) and damar resin. This art form has existed for centuries, but because of the natural properties of the wax it does require to be displayed out of direct sunlight in a temperature controlled environment.
