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Description
36" x 48"
Oil on Canvas

Statement:

‘A Time’ confronts a fear of mortality. For reference I chose a post-mortem photograph of an anonymous middle-aged man because of its suggestion of paternal death. When I was ten years old, my father, the individual I was most deeply connected to, passed away. An astute relative at the time, having knowledge of my aspiration to become a comic artist, lent me a book of Caravaggio’s works. I feel it was there that I first engaged the symbolic potential of painting.

The sanguine drapes, suspended above the dead in Caravaggio’s most funereal works, entertained my superstition that one’s essence should pass beyond its delicate, flesh vessel into an eternal afterlife. This idea is still a part of the nostalgia for my father, and thus I have painted my subject in symbolic, red fabrics.

The absent head of the sitter is a replicated fragment of an Arnold Böcklin painting that describes a stairway ending with the entrance of a tomb. To me this represents a contrasting vision of mortality, in which there is a discernable moment at which a life ends, and there is nothing further.

Description
36" x 48"
Oil on Canvas

Statement:

‘A Time’ confronts a fear of mortality. For reference I chose a post-mortem photograph of an anonymous middle-aged man because of its suggestion of paternal death. When I was ten years old, my father, the individual I was most deeply connected to, passed away. An astute relative at the time, having knowledge of my aspiration to become a comic artist, lent me a book of Caravaggio’s works. I feel it was there that I first engaged the symbolic potential of painting.

The sanguine drapes, suspended above the dead in Caravaggio’s most funereal works, entertained my superstition that one’s essence should pass beyond its delicate, flesh vessel into an eternal afterlife. This idea is still a part of the nostalgia for my father, and thus I have painted my subject in symbolic, red fabrics.

The absent head of the sitter is a replicated fragment of an Arnold Böcklin painting that describes a stairway ending with the entrance of a tomb. To me this represents a contrasting vision of mortality, in which there is a discernable moment at which a life ends, and there is nothing further.