Souls in Purgatory

 Souls in Purgatory, I got this title from a northern Italian artist, Giovanni Bellini, who painted a piece that doesn’t look anything like this, but it’s another case where I had the title, so I had to do a painting. I met this gentleman on Federal Boulevard in Denver, the men on the right. I got to know him ’cause I kept seeing them around and every time I’d see him, I’d hand him $20 and he had no idea. Well, no, initially I said, “you guys I’ll pay you some money if you let me take your photos.” And the guys are all about that. Women, I have a lot tougher time with when I try to pay ’em to take a photograph, they think I’m gonna get him in trouble. And it’s really sad for me.

It just speaks to a larger tragedy that’s, it’s really hard to go into. But, so I painted these guys there a number of things came. To me while I was working on it, they looked like “Boatman on the Volga,” which is a painting by Repin, the Russian artist of the 19th century. And that’s worth looking at.

They’re pulling a boat along a canal and with straps in Repin’s painting, but not in this painting. Halfway through the painting, I got the idea that the thing was looking kind of dull to me, so I put this kind of twilight glow in the sky and it brought the thing to life and I put them in more in shadow than they really were a shadow, this kind of reddish pink violet shadow that I like.

I liked the activity with the cars. I painted a dozen different times with, and you can see remnants of it with this hair that was kind of woven into the trees. I’m not sure why I do that, but I like to do it. The man on the right, that was a hat that I had that put on my own head and painted the weave.

And used thick paint. It’s an interesting technique that I don’t think I’ve used before or after I painted him. These guys said that their bodies are sort of disintegrating toward the edges. It’s a paint application that I think is effective. And now I’ve kind of forgotten that and I’m glad to see this painting again, because it reminds me to do that.

I mean, not in every piece, but it’s really quite effective when things are very, very, very clear in the center and they disintegrate. Toward the edges with thick paint, abrupt paint. It looks like that paint was put on quickly, but I spent many months on this, put it away and go through long periods of hating it and then, then figure out a way that things to do that make me like it again.

And I painted the landscape overlapping the figures a little bit, and I like how you can see through him. It’s a little bit like my see-through dog in the Diogenes “Search of an Honest Man.” I kind of like things being there and not there, or in other ways I’ll do it completely differently with, than there’s just to make things appear and disappear at the same time.

Such as in the sleeping flowers, those flowers have lost edges done. They’re very carefully lost edges. An idea like that is happening like that in this painting. The “Souls in Purgatory,” what a title, isn’t it? Good Souls in Purgatory, and that’s kind of earth is its own purgatory.