Requiem and Study for The Raven

Requiem and Preparatory Study for the Raven. The preparatory study, when I did it, I had no idea it was going to be a preparatory study. But I never do when I’m doing a study, or usually don’t. It was just a piece that I liked, and I thought it was worth continuing on a larger scale. And as you can see, I’ve changed it dramatically.

But what’s in common is the figure and that pink shirt, and the figure doesn’t even reach the ground. And that’s also happening in the Requiem, and that’s a self portrait and it doesn’t reach the ground. I had this amusing thought about Saint Denis, who’s noted in sculpture at the Notre Dame in Paris. He’s a saint who’s been beheaded. That beheading wasn’t immediately fatal to him. Yeah, it’s a pretty remarkable thing, and he kept walking along and preaching the word of God after he had been beheaded. That’s a pretty good trick. And that’s another reason why I like to paint myself in the environment, but there’s not the rest of me. So he marched along and spoke the word of God for another 10 or 20 miles before he finally ran out of gas. But that’s a pretty good trick.

This painting, the Requiem, actually that was intended as a preliminary study for a larger painting and then I never did do the larger piece, I suppose. It kind of said it all that I got it out of my system with this one. There’s the skeleton on the tall table. It’s a reference to the Native American burial tradition, sky burials. This picture involves the interior of a distant landscape. And on the left, it may be hard to see, but there’s a mirror on an easel. It’s at a 45 degree angle.

So it makes it appear as though it’s two windows. And the skeleton appears in the window. And you can see the glass globe at the top of Vanitas and the skull on its side, and the globe is sometimes a recurrent feature of Vanitas symbols. I might just eventually do the larger version of this. It’s really related to the painting called Window with Mirror that John Madden owns and has so generously lent to me. It uses the same landscape, and I think that landscape is more appealing to me. And so if I do a larger version of Requiem, I would use the bigger, lighter sky and lighter values in the distance.