The Damned

Advanced Painting - Spring 05

44"x54"

Spring 2005 - Advanced Painting. Acrylic on Canvas. By this time, I had deemed myself as a surrealist. I enjoy the creation of realistic imagery, but it tends to get boring when one sees something they can see any day. I paint a picture of a tank, a person could go look that up in a tank book or encyclopedia. I paint a portrait of the President, people can watch him on TV. In looking at pieces like I’ve mentioned, the critic is left merely as an observer, they’ll maybe make a few comments, then simply walk on to the next piece. With my work, I like to make my viewer stop and say “Why? How? What is that?” I would rather they say that than “wow, you did a good job on his nose” or, “isn’t that the tank from Saving Private Ryan?” I hate this because it causes the viewer to focus on something other than the work I have created.
With this piece, I pulled out all the stops and wanted to create something that represented the best of my abilities. I produced this painting only using 3 base colors which were green, red and yellow - no black, no white. The reason for this was that I wanted to achieve a greater brilliance of color in my work and found that mixing black with red to create darker tones always gave way to hideous effects in that it would turn into a greyish brown muddy goop before long. Likewise with white, when white is added to red, it makes pink, which is not what I want in my work.
I had begun to take on a sort of Apocalyptic or End of the World theme. For this, I read Revelations in the bible to get myself into the mindset of what I wanted to do with the last 2 paintings I would produce for the semester.
For this piece, I wanted to depict my idea of the souls of the damned and contemplated what would be the worst thing that could ever happen to a person. The idea was simply to take away the one thing that truly makes us human, our ability of passion, of love. Love is something felt through the heart, not the mind. With our minds, we use logic, with our hearts, we use feelings, instincts. At times the heart and mind of one person will be in total disagreement in that the heart wants to believe but the logic of the mind says otherwise. A person who thinks all the time can tend to go insane - we look at convicts and mental asylum patients caged up in padded cells by themselves, solitary confinement - it’ll drive the sane insane. What tends to help the mind is the company of the heart, the strength that comes from within it. If Person were to lose the strength of their heart, logic would take over and they would realize the immediate hopelessness of their situation.
With this idea, I came up with image of a skeleton with it’s head ripped from the spinal column and smashed into the rib cage in place of the heart, therefore damning the soul for all time.