Nulla Salus

Nulla Salus (Savior of None) Gouache and Acrylic on panel, 11x15 inches)

I have a lot of fun imitating things. From an early age I enjoyed doing impressions of TV personalities and cartoon characters. There's something about pretending I'm something else that's always appealed to me. Painting for me has always also been a species of pretend and imitation. My recent work in iconography is a prime example of this. 

Though this painting isn't an icon, its very much in the spirit of my earlier icon paintings. Its an exercise in seeing myself "as" someone else. In this case, my painting is patterned after Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi (savior of the world). Though of course I'm a savior of none, I nevertheless wanted to attempt an imitation of Leonardo's work, though of course it would fall short in a number of ways.

Leonardo's painting is notable not only for its formal qualities but because it recently sold for about $450 million, the most any painting has fetched at auction. I hope to get about a millionth of that price for my rendition. We'll see.

This painting was full of challenges and setbacks. The most apparent to me was the difficulty of painting a face, my own in this instance. Because we're so familiar with faces, we're keenly aware when our representation isn't true to reality. Its easier to get away with generalized mountains, but the faces we paint betray their differences with the real thing immediately. Consequently, I had to repaint the face of this work maybe four times. Each time I lied to myself and said it was good enough, but I could only live this tension so long. I'm ok with how the final likeness turned out.

Another interesting aspect of this imitation, was making the frame, which involved several steps and a whole Sunday. I simply applied moldings from Lowe's to a Rectangular piece of plywood to mimic the original frame. Then I painted the whole thing black and added details in gold. It was important to me to reproduce the frame details with as much fidelity as I could muster. I couldn't put any old frame on this painting. The imitation was incomplete without the mimicry of the frame to give the painting context. The project in total took about 10 hours.

Gouache is nice and quick to work with, but I think my next imitation/meditation will be in oil.