77A+71B

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on December 22, 2018 at 9:15am

Curator’s Comments:

This numerically designated work came up randomly on the site this morning, and I’m taken in by the mysteriously iconography.  While I have admired the quality and prolific amount of figurative paintings you have on the site for some time, this piece now stands apart with more abstracted stylization and mythological associations.  The main figure appears to be embracing a proportionally large white bird, summoning erotic associations with Leda & the Swan.  Their link to the small and more realistic portrait of the man above, which could be Zeus, appears tenuous due to the thin red staff and tethering rope.  I don’t fully understand, on a conscious level, the red dot in the upper left of the piece.  It could function as an oculus, or “all seeing eye”.  Or it could simply be the sun in the muted green sky.  The low chroma brownish hues are somewhat unexpected for the scene, which contains dramatic and supernatural beings.  It’s an enigmatic image- straightforward in depiction of form, but layered with narrated content.