End of the Season Boots (Acrylic Painting)

I made significant progress on the painting tonight. It's inspired by my trip to the Holocaust museum in DC (ages ago). There is a section of the museum that has piles of peoples things: watches, toothbrushes, eye-glasses, etc. One of the piles is a pile of shoes...there was a poem that accompanied this pile:

We are the Shoes

We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the hellfire

– Moshe Szulsztein, Yiddish Poet

While circumstances aren't even remotely similar here in McMurdo, there is something very telling about people's shoes. Especially "End of the Season Boots," which look like hell and hopefully kept someone's feet warm.

...in progress.

A photograph of some abandoned end of the season boots I found in the hallway that I used as a model for the painting.