I started Creation, 64x48”, at the end of June, and signed it a few days ago. Undoubtedly my quickest completed major work.
It doesn’t belie how complex the painting is, virtually a treatise on the transparent nature of shadows, composing rhythms of human body (parallels of the legs and arms, yet feeling natural). The math of triangulating, proportions, and perspective was absolutely insane.
In an important way I feel I am completing the humanist revolution from the Italian Renaissance. Da Vinci, Michelangelo and the Medici thinktankers were trying to integrate humanism to Christianity, and radically update the very crude Medieval aesthetic. In Michelangelo’s Creation, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, God gives Adam the spark of life. Kind of an odd homoerotic theme for the concept of creation. When a heterosexual couple is the obvious starting point.
The concept of the painting started with the most passionate exaltation I could think of, then using all my art knowledge and skills to make it come alive.
An interesting theme, is that their shadows are literally transparent, making them part of the stuff of the universe, and it is the light that forms them and their details.
I hope you enjoy it.
Cheers,
Michael, Idyllwild, August 16, 2022