September/October 2005- I chronicled the creation of this painting from the initial sketch to the last work day.Click here to see the creation of this work.The original idea for this painting was- What if I fell down a hill while walking my dogs and I broke in half? And what if a glowing tiny new me popped out from out of my hollow body. After listening to the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, I became fascinated by the matter of fact accounts of gruesome death and killing, as well as the constant references to dogs eating corpses. I was also drawn to the strange mingling of earthly and heavenly beings.

I was visually inspired by three works. One work is a late 19th century English painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art which I cannot remember the name of or find any information about on-line.

Another work is Hagar in the Wilderness, by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first time I saw this painting I didn’t think much of it except it depicted space very strangely. Upon subsequent viewings this image became more and more weird. I originally (and stupidly) thought it was a Courbet so I was very confused to see it featuring an angel. In a "declaration", Courbet expounded the merits of Realism and said "Show me an angel, and I'll paint one.", so you can imagine my befuddlement upon discovering a Courbet with an angel. I think this misattribution and the discovery that it wasn't a Courbet shifted the image from my short term to my long term stores where it is frequently used as an example of a meaningful landscape with figures. This painting also brought to my attention the interesting conundrum of how does a Realist deal with religion/the supernatural. American's didn't seem to be nearly as wary of the inherent contradiction of depicting the unreal in a Realist work. Tanner and Eakins both associated with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts coupled the two often and in my opinion in really strange ways. I know Tanner was a "believer" so I guess I have to believe Realists dabbling in the unreal were sincere and not critiquing their subjects, which is a shame.

The third work is The Wolf of Gubbio by Sassetta. The Wolf of Gubbio is a story from the life of St. Francis. A wolf is terrorizing the town of Gubbio, so Francis comes and makes a contract with the wolf to stop eating the inhabitants of the town as long as the townspeople feed him. The first time I saw it, I was struck by the dismembered corpse in the background. I have never seen this work in person; however, I am very familiar with The Meeting of St. Anthony and St. Paul in the National Gallery of Art. It's one of my benchmark continuous narrative images. I've always wanted to depict several instances of a story in one image like this but I can't think of anything appropriate. Much of my own personal interest in the history of art (primarily but not limited to "2D" works) is how have people explored time and space using materials that are inherently incapable of dealing with time and space beyond their own being. What I mean by that is, a painting has mass, so it takes up space. When the materials are finally combined and fixed in their final end state they will continue to exist in time until they are altered, destroyed, etc. But beyond this, what does an object with paint on it have to do with time and space. How does Sassetta from the 15th century explore time and space? Is it only illusion, or the time it took to paint it, or compositional elements that take more time to look at than others, or the time it takes to look at the whole work, etc? How does someone post-Relativity in the 21st century explore time and space in a work of art? I would like to say that this question of time and space is in the forefront of my mind when I make things, but I really can't, but I wish I could. However, one way I believe I do deal with time is by appropriating styles or compositions from past art movements. I believe this to be a modern practice. Yes, there have been other periods and artists that explored or revived older styles; Emperor Augustus rejected veristic Republican Roman Portraiture for the Classical Greek style which was 400 years old at that time, and William Blake asserted that only Gothic art, such as illumination, was true art, a style 500 to 600 years old. I think we differ now from them in how fluidly we pick and choose how or when from we get our ideas and approaches. We also differ in that choosing one thing over another is not a rejection or judgment of good or bad, but a choice of usefulness, just like you might choose to wear a pair of boots to go hiking instead of your slippers. This is the defining character of our current artistic age, but I admit that a little part of me doesn't mind the idea of another Greenberg coming along and saying to hell with this and instituting a "correct" style.

You might notice that the small black dog, Cole, is looking at the viewer. He is doing this to indicate that this is a sacred/supernatural event as in a Sacra Conversazione. If you follow the sacra conversazione link in the previous sentence you will see Domenico Veneziano's The Madonna and Child with Saints c. 1445. John the Baptist is making eye contact with you, the viewer, while he points at Mary and Jesus in the middle who look at the other saints. Figures such as John in sacra conversaziones are a way of breaking the proscenium of the picture plain, virtually saying "Hey you! You are looking at something profound" as if the viewer just stumbled into a real room with real people. The presence of a figure looking out at the viewer in paintings was not new in Veneziano's time, but the creation of a unified, illusionistic space was. Creating such a "real" space for sacred happenings brought these two different worlds crashing together with bizarre consequences.