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Akuji

By Akuji
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Midi Newbie

Midi

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Wow, that's a great painting, Father! I like how the body dissapears into the other man's coat and how he is holding it as if he wants to hide something desperately. Looking at this painting and your avatar on this forum, I have to ask: are hands by coincidence a recurring theme in your art?

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FatherAlabaster Grand Master

FatherAlabaster

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Wow, that's a great painting, Father! I like how the body dissapears into the other man's coat and how he is holding it as if he wants to hide something desperately. Looking at this painting and your avatar on this forum, I have to ask: are hands by coincidence a recurring theme in your art?
Thanks, and, yes. I love hands. They can be so expressive. I'm not really a fan of elaborate coded gestures, though, I'd rather stick with my own perception of what hand positions, facial expressions, and body language actually mean.
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FatherAlabaster Grand Master

FatherAlabaster

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It's annoying, but at least it's predictable. I got used to oils, though, and developed certain techniques that I'm not sure how to mimic in acrylic. I could see acrylic being conducive to a different set of techniques. Maybe it's something I'll explore later. Some of my favorite artists have made the switch for health reasons...

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mindy6158 Newbie

mindy6158

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It's annoying' date=' but at least it's predictable. I got used to oils, though, and developed certain techniques that I'm not sure how to mimic in acrylic. I could see acrylic being conducive to a different set of techniques. Maybe it's something I'll explore later. Some of my favorite artists have made the switch for health reasons...[/quote'] What health reasons??
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GorboGorboze Newbie

GorboGorboze

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Hey Alabaster, I have liked this painting a lot ever since I saw earlier posts about it. I dig the iconography allusion to the removal of J.C. from the cross, but with a sith lord aspect...very badassed. The contradiction between what the right and left hands of the hidden master are doing is pathological, a gesture of possession and the gesture of exclusion, very nice. And as others comment the vitality of your hands is impressive. The insensate expression of the face of the victim or acolyte (can't tell which, maybe both) seemed corny or comic bookish in its earlier state, but has since been rendered with a good deal more gravity if I'm not mistaken. The freakishly short upper arm marks it as an authentic Father Alabaster, which disturbs and delights. I am a big fan of your painting, and would so love to own one. Rereading Midi's comment I would venture a quick analysis that the hidden master is the conscious mind arising from the persona to posses and hide from it, while the hands are the composite factions of the victims unconscious that support and display like Thing or Vanna White.

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Iceni Newbie

Iceni

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I have to a question though, what's up with the hood? I could take a stab as to why it's there but what I want to ask is whether I should assume there's a head underneath it. The way the cloth is bent and the hood is shaped makes it look like there's something weirder under it.

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FatherAlabaster Grand Master

FatherAlabaster

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I enjoy and appreciate all of the analysis. Thank you! Iceni, it's supposed to be ambiguous. I actually painted several other ideas in place before discarding them and returning to the hood, because I found that being anything more than suggestive robbed the image of its power. I don't like to tell people "exactly what it's about" because that closes off a lot of doors. I will say that my approach to this image is a product of my ongoing fascination with the tension in some medieval art, between the doll-like expressionlessness of the figures (or at times their overwrought piety) and the horrific, immediate nature of the things that are happening to and around them - a tension I'm not trying to emulate, so much as evoke. And I was thinking about all of the layers of artifice involved in the act of presenting a sacrifice, how the nature of a sacrifice is to be a substitute, the contradictions implicit in that. It's a theme I've been interested in since before college, based on some reading I did about the origin of the scapegoat in Greek mythology. For the past few years, it's had a good amount of light to shed on my own goal with painting, which is not to create a picture "of" something, but to make an object that actually feels present. That's something that religious art from various cultures has done with a lot of success, though I'm sure that my sense of that has nearly as much to do with the environment the work is presented in, as it does with the work itself.

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