The Suffering Artist

Our latest blog post, this one about a nativity by Caravaggio. Happy holidays from us here at The Suffering Artist!

Here's our latest blog post if you have interest and about 2 minutes!

Our latest blog post for anyone with interest and about 2 or 3 minutes of spare time!

I've been working on art related to the theme of adoption. This is my latest effort.

We've moved our art posts to our blog and are cross posting them here, if anyone is interested. We miss our exhibits but look forward to kicking off the new year by resuming art classes and hosting several really interesting shows. See you then!

Our latest art blog post. We're keeping with season for the next few weeks!

More dark stuff for October! I’ll wager that the name Hieronymus Bosch is not on the tip of anybody’s tongue. But, then again, maybe it is. He may have painted in the 16th century but his work is still popular in the surrealist corners of the 21st century. It’s even trendy enough to adorn socks, Doc Martens, and skateboards. And Metallica used one of his paintings as inspiration for the video to their song Until it Sleeps. His style was extremely distinctive, especially for i...ts time. If you take a look at this triptych of The Last Judgment (1503) you’ll see why one writer described Bosch’s work as ‘daydreams and nightmares.’ It’s a good fit for our dark turn towards Halloween. The final Christian judgment isn’t a unique topic in western art. You could even call it pedestrian. Bosch just had a peculiar way of handling this staple of Christian theology. His Garden of Eden on the left mostly conforms to artistic norms: it’s a beautiful landscape and the Adam and Eve story follows the standard Biblical arc. But what’s happening up there in the sky is terrifying, more so because no one below sees it coming. God has expelled rebellious angels from his presence and the falling devils look like a swarm of insects locked in aerial combat. Darkness, terror, and violence are all descending on the idyllic world below. And I don’t need to tell you that they’re not coming to have ghoulish fun. Judgment and hell take up the other two panels. If the left panel was meant as a portent, here is what it foreshadowed. The typical ‘hell’ imagery of fire and destruction is present but moved to the background. That leaves us to be primarily confronted with an overwhelming orgy of torture. Those devils descending from the sky over Eden are having their way with the world now. Zoom in and look at some of the things going on. The demons flay, burn, boil, mutilate, castrate, rape, impale, and dismember at will. Typical judgment scenes depict the virtuous on one side and the damned on the other, but here all we see is the gross and relentless dispatch of the damned. The way he portrayed it manages to be graphic without being gratuitous, though, which makes us think about the purpose all of this serves. In Bosch’s mind, humanity let it come to this, which is especially dark. It’s really inventive, even a little bit sci-fi for 16th century. He likely painted it with the help of assistants. But it’s still his vision even if he didn’t personally imagine every detail. So I have to ask, what kind of mind comes up with this stuff? I wish I could pry into his brain to find out. Or maybe go back in time to chat with him as it came together. We’re getting closer to Halloween. Darkness is descending! Share your thoughts, if you dare.

Good Sunday evening! Our gallery's fall lineup typically includes an October show dedicated to macabre and darker-themed art then a November show dedicated to veterans. These are two of our favorite traditions. However, we have decided to forgo both exhibits and receptions this year. ... We apologize to everyone who supports these autumn exhibits. There are ways to conduct our shows safely, we admit. It's just that by the time we had a sensible (and possibly innovative!) approach worked out, it was too late to call for artists. Too late to give them adequate time, anyway. We look forward to a very good 2021. Our plan is to resume all of our traditional shows, spotlight a few more local artists, and keep up our monthly art classes. And let's hope we can pull off a few of our innovative ideas while we're at it. Happy fall!

For the month of October our art posts will be in keeping with the ghoulish season. Maybe it'll be something macabre, spooky, a little grotesque. I don't know. It just needs to fit. So here's our first effort. Perseus with the Head of Medusa is a bronze sculpture completed in 1554 for the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, Italy. The sculptor was Benvenuto Cellini. That’s not a very familiar name. But I bet his patron’s name will ring a bell. He was Duke Cosimo de Medici. T...he unimaginable Medic wealth funded a lot of the art from that era. It eventually enabled them to dominate Florence, too. Most see this sculpture as a symbol of that financial and political triumph. In keeping with our dark Halloween theme, it’s fairly graphic and doesn’t spare the gore. Maybe that was meant to be a comment on the Medici or the bloody corpse of the republic they subdued and came to rule. When Medici first looked at the prototype he was flummoxed. Cellini wanted to make it a single cast. Bronze casting is an insanely demanding process. You have to sculpt an inner and outer clay mold then fill the cavity between them with wax. You then pour hot bronze into that cavity and the wax melts and floods out. The bronze stays and hardens in place. This piece was such a complex design that Medici thought the bronze would clot before it ever filled the mold out. Couldn’t Cellini do the piece in sections then join those finished pieces to solve the complexity problem? Donatello had done that with a piece right there in the same plaza. Cellini rebuffed that suggestion. He said his expertise was such that he could pull it off exactly as planned. They were both somewhat right, it turns out. The bronze curdled several times and ruined several attempts as the work progressed. Cellini blamed it on the fire not being hot enough and the melted bronze not being liquefied enough. He bet quite a bit on this hunch: to stoke the fire hotter he threw his own wood furniture on the fire. To make the bronze runnier, he melted down several of his own pewter pieces to blend with the bronze. It all paid off, obviously. And he wasn’t shy about basking in the accomplishment. I could now prove to the Duke how well I knew my business, is how he put it a while later. He took it to more lofty levels than that, actually, comparing himself to Jesus in how he brought the dead work to new life. I guess we can overlook his smugness because he achieved something pretty amazing, after all. In any event, it’s a great sculpture that tells three great stories. We can look at it and see a great myth, think about a great republic falling under the spell of one impossibly rich and powerful family, or remember the efforts of one very determined artist. Happy first official day of the Halloween season. We’ll see what comes next week. Share your thoughts!