This is the first of what became a series of paintings. The title is, “The Prodigal”.
The series came about as the result of going to a gallery opening in New York that included paintings by some of my friends. The theme was the male nude. In the course of conversation, one of the artists suggested that I should think about doing one. I hadn’t considered the before, because I didn’t feel I had anything new to bring to such a classic subject, but I left thinking about it, and after a few months, decided to try one.
I found a suitable model to work with and after some experimentation, we found a pose that he would be able to hold during the extended sessions. He came regularly and the work seemed to go smoothly, but after a few sessions I became aware that I really didn’t like the painting that was coming together. It seemed predictable and rather academic, and I realized that I had no desire to finish it.
During a break, I told the him I wanted to try something else. I wanted him to assume a variety of poses that I would photograph. He was agreeable, and because he had been an actor and dancer, he understood how to use his body to create expressive shapes and lines. When we were through with the session, I had several hundred shots, and while many seemed interesting, I felt uncertain about what to do with them and not entirely comfortable with the idea of painting from photos. So, I put them away.
About a year later, I happened to see a homeless man on the street who was partially naked, and I suddenly realized that there was a big difference between nude and naked, and that nude was the cleaned-up, polite, art world term for a person without clothes. It was the word that the person who was wearing clothes used. The person without clothes was naked.
With this insight, a window opened. I realized naked was a powerful word that carried a tremendous emotional charge. Naked is exposed. Naked is a person without their cultural costume or societal mask. Naked carries the potential of shame, vulnerability, and even of freedom and joy. I also realized that from a compositional viewpoint, being free from the constraints of positions that a model could maintain through the painting process, opened new possibilities for creating uniquely expressive images.
I began revisiting my photos again and realized that with some of the positions, especially those that were more extreme, I experienced the pose in an almost sympathetic way in my own body. This insight led me to a new understanding of how we all experience, and sometimes even mirror the body language of one another, and that perhaps these poses carried with them their own emotional or spiritual symbolic content and meaning.
As this series develops, it becomes clearer to me that there is an interior world of silence within which we all experience our true inner reality, a reality that is often obscured by the surface noise of our daily lives.
During the process, a common theme has emerged that for me ties them all together. The phrase, “Ecce Homo” came to me one day while working. It is the phrase that Pilot used when presenting the stripped and beaten Christ to the mob and which in art is an historically important subject for painting and sculpture.
In the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries its use and meaning broadened considerably to represent a person stripped of societal projection, or a person laid bare. It was the phrase Nietzsche used to title his strange, last autographical work that speaks of “how one becomes what one is.” It is in this meaning that I view these paintings. “Ecce Homo” — “Behold the “Man.”