10.01.01| sagrado corazon

Two recent paintings, completed earlier this summer, were added to the Various Portraits gallery: Thinking of You and My Arms Heavy With Absence Cannot Hold the Abundance of You. Both were experiments with flat color/tones and smooth textures, merging folk painting styles with photo-realistic techniques.

Both images also incorporate hand-painted text; Thinking of You has a "bastardized" haiku running along the edges of the canvas:

a room with too many conversations, until | suddenly a break, a tide shifting, i think of you, | a small haunting

At the time, I was reading two or three different translations of traditional Japanese poetry. Although my verse does not follow the standard formula of 5 - 7 - 5 syllable count, the theme has a Zen-inspired minimalism.

For the second painting, the full title itself mirrors traditional haiku construction; it also plays with a half-rhyme between "absence" and "abundance."

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Earlier in September, I posted the completed image of sagrado corazon, an image which began as a representation of Christ for the new millennium. It developed from numerous sources of inspiration: Salvador Dali's nuclear mystical period, Edward Burne-Jones' medievalism, and other painters from the Symbolist movement.

The main figure, although based in realistic terms, is transluscent, exposing his sacred heart, represented by a ripe pomegranate set behind him. He exists as a duality, both myth and history, spectre and human.