Golden Handcuffs
Portrait Paintings- Medium
- Oil on Panel
- Dimensions
- 11.8 x 11.8 x 1.6" (H x W x D)
Through this painting I wanted to depict the internal turmoil of the COVID era — the struggle to balance work and life all at once. With employers losing empathy for their employees, it became stressful to stay motivated and happy in everyday circumstances.
Or commission a similar work →Artist's Statement
My work deals with the exploration of human emotions. When you know someone long enough, you understand their micro-expressions and the mood they are in just by looking at them. These emotions affect everything and everyone around them, like a light that illuminates everything in its path. That is what I like capturing — this beauty in people's emotions and what a person conveys in a moment.
This piece was born in the thick of COVID, when my husband was going through a hard stretch at work — long days, vanishing empathy from employers, and the constant strain of holding work and life together. One morning, while he sipped his coffee, I watched him from across our kitchen table, lost somewhere far away as he stared out the window. I felt helpless. In his face I could read everything he wasn't saying: the quiet exhaustion, the longing for relief, the invisible "golden handcuffs" that keep us bound to our obligations even when every part of us wants to step away. That is the emotion I wanted to hold onto — a man adrift in a sea of his own thoughts, caught in a moment so many of us know but rarely admit to.
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