Nude Descending A Staircase
© 2015
Media: oil & mastic on canvas
Location: in a collection
Hover/tap here for Price $6,300 framed
56 x 38 inches (142 x 96 cm)
Every one of us has experienced, in dreaming, or daydreaming, or perhaps in poetry, imaginary ways of seeing a narrative. There are connections between things and aspects of our lives that cannot be well described rationally, a kind of beauty that doesn't usually appear in our day-to-day consciousness, except by surprise, but that provides a different and equally important way of perceiving our lives. These impressions may be sparked anew, like a déja vu, by imagery that resonates in that same archetypal way. It’s important to remain aware of this other way of seeing, this language of the imagination; it helps us to expand the way in which we live, because the definitions by which we live are themselves the product of the cultural imaginary.
I have been fascinated by the light in the leaves in the forest, that intense backlit color. It is very hard to capture in paint the greens of the leaves. In this case I just went for the power of the blue sky interpreted as a mandala. The silhouette was double-exposed in-camera, but something was missing so I found the image of the girl in the doorway, and I did a lot of work in Photoshop before I started the oil painting.
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For those of you with low vision:
This painting is of a woman’s nude silhouette walking down a staircase away from us, lit by yellow-orange sunlight pouring through windows behind her, in a space which is a large canopy of dark green trees in shadow. The nave of leaves is backlit by a bright blue sky peeking through in a doily pattern of dots. A few patches of sunlight reveal the large pine tree trunk in the left foreground. The staircase railing extends along a landing in front of the woman to where a young girl in shorts and a t-shirt is looking back as she steps through an open french window, nearly silhouetted in the sunlight, at the center of this mandala.
