Locked in...

I am going to analyze one of those paintings that has really influenced me a lot. I found it displayed in an art gallery. I do not quite remember the name of the painter (the picture attached above is one I took with my cellphone camera). On first look, we see an old, rusted blue door that is locked, and it all seems relatively simple. However, what I felt most captivating about this picture is the lock – the lock does not have a keyhole.

Locks of this kind do not have a keyhole underneath. Meaning there is only one place the keyhole can be, the back. In other words, what we see is the back of the lock. I think of it as an implicit depiction of a person who locked himself inside that door. That is to say, he wanted to lock away something in that room, but it was so much a part of him that he locked himself away in that pursuit.
To make it more clear - consider the fact that the door is blue in color. Blue – a color that stands for loneliness, sorrow or at times even solitude, someone (An introvert, such as I) tried to find relief under the confines of solitude (like I did, once) and it has become so home-like to him that he along with the door has grown old, years like tides taking away parts of that person and even today that door stands rusted yet locked (like it still is). I think of the person lost behind that door as an embodiment of all the emotions that he failed to express, the love he never confessed, the hand he never held, the chance he never took, the mountains he never climbed; but had always yearned to. In that sense, the something he tried to lock away behind that door was a person that he could have been.