Palm Sunday, and at the risk of offending the majority of peoples
on the planet, as well as, finding out who my most bad-ass followers are, I
posted the above pictures on social media, no captions.
Truth be told, as offensive, or maybe as embarrassing, as my post might
be, this graphic, Sergio Leone-like representation of Christ with its
lenticular lens came to me totally sanctioned by The Church. It was bought in a place of worship (I don’t
remember which exact one) in Ravenna, yes Italy, lest there be one or two such
towns in the USA. …Though it might have
been purchased at the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, but I think it was some historic church in Ravenna…
It was bought and carried back
to the U.S. by a cherished and much respected student of mine when he was
travelling in Europe between his senior and junior years in the mid to late 1980’s
(the abstraction of time is a real thing for me, so I am never exact on that). It has traveled with me ever since.
Truth be told (one more again), I was always a little scared of this thing
and kept it wrapped in a flat file for years.
One day, a few years back, while cleaning the studio, I decided to free
it from its newsprint constraints and let it oversea my work space. As Shane knew I would, I do love it,
precisely because of all its contradictions.
I decided to post pictures of it this year because it represents the
single defining event which republicans running the show right now point to as the
excuse for their greedy, egregious, and most unchristian-like behavior.
I agree with Steve Earl that art is empathy; and in so being, it can't help but speak to truth. In revealing truth, Art also can’t help but be, at times, offensive.
Not that my pictures are in any way art, but my training is one in
which art was supposed to reveal things beyond the veil of the everyday; so
sometimes, even with my mundane posts, that’s what I do (whether or not, and probably usually, it bites me in the ass (-;).
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