Playing for Keeps
© 2024
Media: oil on canvas
Location: in a collection
36 x 32 inches
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For those of you with low vision:
This painting shows the view out of a pair of Gothic windows onto a clustering of little chapels with crosses at the tops of their facades with 6 boys playing soccer with a ball that is the planet Earth. It becomes apparent that the viewer is in a tomb, made of deep sienna walls with Gothic tracery, looking out the windows barred with criss cross metal grilles, and that there's a stone coffin in the foreground, in deep umber colors, sculpted with a bas relief pattern. The boys are caught in an arc of poses from bending to leaping in an arc of motion from right to left, in colorful t-shirts and shorts against the mostly washed-out colors of the stone tomb facades jammed together filling the background with their rooftops and crosses crowding to the horizon against a bright hazy blue sky high in the picture. Facing us, prominent behind the boys, are several very dark Gothic doorways with grilled windows, which make a strong composition with the array of boys' bodies.
