Since my brother’s death I have been in a fugue state of some kind.

To be honest, there is a way that the loss of a younger sibling

is a cutting off of a life’s connection.

 

Like the disciples on Holy Saturday, I don’t know where I stand.

It’s showing in my paintings.

 

One has a dark blue feminine figure moving swiftly in a graveyard with sun struck pink crosses; I’m calling it Sabbath of the Dead Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

Another one has a couple of indigenous types in a forest clearing holding watch at a funeral pyre, a crowned figure on a chimeric mount (looks like a hyena, a dog, or an ox). The bodies of my brother, my sister (six years ago) and my brother-in-law (last year) were cremated. I think this painting is about that—–

The King Is Dead; Long Live the King. 

 

With death and cremation of the ideals and the body of the dead king, a nation grieving, not perceiving a necessary new conception of its own existence,

becomes victim of essential self-interest. Unless, of course, the citizen royals, offspring of an integrated dignity, capitalize on the internal, almost inborn influence of an eternal ideal of survival: thekingisdeadlonglivetheking.

In primeval forests, at the very birth of human aspirational community, lay the drives of selfish promulgation of one’s own place in the hierarchy,

a realization of Eden’s retrieval from universal exile.

From dense canopy comes a chimerical rider on an apocalyptic animal, reclaiming from mythological ambiguities whom to love~and why~and how,

mystical messages beckoning us from the brink of desperation.

 

I’m hoping for and praying for a new sense of hope, after all the deaths of friends and family; I am constantly somewhat bereft. Another of the recent paintings is entitled Beheld by the Sacred Bull, the Dark Sun Beckons, What Next?

 

 

 

 

 

I think I’m in need of a period of resolute attendance on God’s gracious healing. I await Pentecost’s relief.