Albatross

I love Taylor Swift’s music. I’ve listened to it for hours nearly every day for more than 15 years. What has always drawn me in is her storytelling, the vulnerability, emotional intensity, dramatic feeling, and the way her songs create vivid imagery. As a painter, I connect deeply with lyrics that paint a picture. I may not know the real-life references behind her songs, but I know how they make me feel. After spending so much time with her work, it naturally found its way into mine.

One of my favorite ways I’ve used her influence is by taking moments, symbols, or emotional threads from different songs and weaving them into paintings in a way that tells my story.

In Temptress, for example, the bright crack in the horizon through the trees is shaped like an albatross, a reference to her song “The Albatross”, said to reference The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The lyric “One less temptress, one less dagger to sharpen” inspired the title of the painting. There is also an archer hidden in the trees, referencing her song “The Archer” and the lyric, “I’ve been the archer, I’ve been the prey.” In the painting, the archer is aimed at the albatross.

For me, this became a way of expressing my experience of being a woman: having femininity blamed or attacked by others, while also internalizing that judgment and wounding myself. That inner conflict created a great deal of tension in my life and contributed to my chronic pain.

Yet that same area is also the light source of the painting, the place the eye escapes to. In this context, it can represent how moving toward the uncomfortable thing can sometimes become the path out.

I’ve also noticed that Taylor Swift writes about moments of reflection above the chaos, sometimes through the image of being “above the trees.” When I started this painting, I wanted it to contain that feeling: a place you would hike to, pause at, and see clearly from.

This also connects back to “The Albatross”, where the bird begins as a warning and a curse and, by the end of the song, becomes a form of rescue.

I truly love how all those little storylines overlap and speak to one another within one picture.

Inspired by:

Taylor Swift songs: The Albatross, The Archer, Happiness, I Hate It Here

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Gustave Doré’s engraving: “The Albatross is Shot”