Paintings 2022-

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Agony

40”x 80”

Oil on Canvas, January 2022

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The Golden Bough

60” x 40”

Oil paint on Canvas

(2019-2022)

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The Golden Bough is a branch from a sacred tree that allows safe passage through the underworld. The mythology comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, an ancient Roman poem, written between 29-19 BC. In book 6, Aeneas visits Apollo’s seer, the prophetess Sibyl who becomes Aeneas’ guide for crossing into the kingdom of death. The Sibyl tells Aeneas about the golden bough, to be found in the sacred grove of Diana; an alien branch within the order of nature, glowing with a discolored aura. Aeneas in anxiety begins searching the forest. His goddess mother, Venus, sends two doves that guide him to the tree. In the painting the two illuminated lights felt like an homage to the twin doves. The lamp with the dead bulb seemed to suggest the land of the dead. Aeneas takes the death-journey to find the shade of his father and speak to him face-to-face. His father shows Aeneas the vision of his destiny, and tells him, “we each suffer our own demanding ghost.”

The painting is Virgilian in method in the sense that is tempers passion with disciplined devotion to vocation and craft. Both are necessary, which is one reason I chose to frame and display the palette with the painting. The palette gives insight to the passionate process of creation that the composed and finished painting conceals.

I worked on the painting for 3 years from 2019-2022, years of turbulence and transition. “The theme of great transition is, of course, closely connected to the virgilian sense of Vocation,” C.S. Lewis calls Virgil’s poetry, “the poetry of passion at war with vocation” in contrast to more spontaneous poetry we find in Homer, or any other form of impulsive expression. The mode of creation chosen with this painting was an intentional decision made to embody Virgil’s ideas about what values a poet or hero should represent to the world while seeking to discover new foundations. It felt like a good time to go back into history and look at what a great poet was thinking during a comparably turbulent time in Ancient Rome, before reorienting in the present and looking forward.

On a technical level the painting was painted “in reverse”, from light to dark. The black paint of the background was painted after the branches, and in my opinion the blackness is it’s own presence in the painting, rather than just negative or empty space.

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Underworld

(Palette from The Golden Bough)