Stable

Stable, Oil on canvas

In Stable, Strahan constructs a dense psychological tableau in which the figure appears in multiple, contorted forms—mirrored, inverted, erotic, and fractured across shifting spatial planes. The title operates as a deliberate double entendre: a reference both to emotional stability and to the literal stable in which the horse—an archetype of empathy and instinct—resides. The horse functions as the painting’s emotional core, embodying the artist’s inner life and the instinctive intelligence through which he navigates it.

The central figure, rendered in cool tones, represents the conscious self striving for balance atop the horse. Opposing him is his inverted double, painted in feverish reds—an embodiment of the shadow, desire, and the disruptive forces that once penetrating, and integrating of one’s own disowned impulses. Their entwined, almost sexual configuration visualizes a direct confrontation with the self: a merging, New York, grounding the scene in autobiography and marking the moment of claimed autonomy and self-formation. The red figure wears the artist’s own boots from his early years in

Across the canvas, Strahan collapses interiority and exteriority, memory and present, abstraction and anatomy. The fractured composition, shifting viewpoints, and overlapping bodies mirror the nonlinear architecture of the artist’s mind—a hyperperceptive cognition that perceives many layers at once. The work becomes an act of individuation: the conscious self riding, negotiating, and ultimately integrating the emotional and shadow selves that constitute an authentic, stable whole.

Stable is less a scene than a psychological map. It visualizes the tension, eroticism, vulnerability, and self-reckoning required to attain inner balance, revealing a self no longer divided against itself but actively, intimately, and unapologetically becoming whole.