The Birthday Anxiety

The birthday party, for some, may encapsulate a person’s first sense of self-narrative. It is a memory of a performative self-celebratory event. This can be perhaps one of the most significant memories of childhood and indeed fill someone with an anxiety of the unexpected.

The representation of the figure held in an absorptive introspective state is a device that serves to create and manifest absorption within the viewer.  ‘The primacy of absorption’, articulated through the writings of modernist art critic and art historian Michael Fried;

’A personage entirely absorbed or engrossed in an action, feeling, or state of mind is by virtue of that fact wholly unaware of anything but the object of his or her absorption, starting with the beholder standing before the painting’.