"76" - a surreal portrait

Here is another acrylic painting that I am currently working on for my "Sufferin' Succotash" series.

This time it is almost purely surreal portraiture. It does not have the same vaguely moral undertone as the previous painting "Good Guy With A Gun," which honestly, is more preferable to me. There is something that feels slightly dirty about imbuing a painting with explicit morality (I guess that's the quality that makes things "political").

But I suppose in the end this painting could have some dueling symbols. Upended on the bottom there is a horse that seems distressed, which arcs (or smokes) up through black and ghostly flowers, crowned at the top by an iconic gas station sign. Can that be interpreted or translated into something moral? I suppose that's up to the viewer.

I think a beneficial quality of surrealism is that the viewer goes into a painting knowing that things don't have to necessarily add up. But even so, human nature has this innate ability to, through symbolic paredolia, make sense of nonsense.