War (oil on canvas, 40"x60")
Famine (oil on canvas, 40"x60")
Pestilence (oil on canvas, 40"x60")
Death (oil on canvas, 40"x60")
About This Series
Biblical narrative winds its way through art history, but there’s a horror in these myths that’s rarely made explicit. I see the people around me expecting the end of the world in our lifetimes, and it brings me back to the religious obsession with apocalypse, or uncovering.
As an artist, I’m always reaching for that thing that becomes visible when the surface is peeled back. In the case of Death and Pestilence, that peeling back was literal. By applying hundreds of thin layers, I built transparent bodies that alternately conceal and reveal the flesh and bones beneath.
Within this shared theme there’s contrast. In Pestilence the uncovered flesh is rotting and seething with life, whereas in Death there are only bones in air. In both cases, the horror lies in half-glimpsing what should stay hidden behind skin.
In War and Famine, the revelation was more psychological. For both pieces I let the horses fill the background so the human undoing could take focus.
War looks at this apocalypse within individual bodies, showing how unbearable circumstance reduces normal people to shadowy monsters driven by violence and fear. Famine is different. The hungry faces come together to form a mass of gnashing teeth. Individual characteristics become hard to pick out, and we are confronted with an overwhelming density of need.
This series is the result of two years of work. I suspect it is only the first step in what will be a lifetime of recontextualizing these ancient myths and exploring how they reveal themselves in the present.