At its core ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is a story about a beautiful, normal day of innocent enjoyment of life being interrupted by a violent intervention, the wolf. The violence of war is just one of these interruptions, halting the beauty of human life and threatening to pull everything into a vortex of darkness and destruction.
This painting could be situated inside of an elegant house or a museum, with light green-grey walls. On the wall, just off the middle axis of the painting hangs a gold-framed picture of a mother breastfeeding a baby. This calm, intimate moment is about to be obscured by a soldier in a dark grey coat who is rushing past towards an undefined dark space on the right. However, the coat and helmet are empty, components of machinery that can be refilled with anonymous human material. The darkness that is about to swallow him up. It is a space where humans are being distorted into crude cartoons of themselves. Subtlety doesn’t exist. The sharp spikes on the barbed wire echo the teeth in the muzzle of the wolf.