EF's Art Blog

  • Final blog curation

    This is perhaps not the best painting I have ever done. Or the painting that I would have imagined to be my * final work * on this course. I am welling up as I write this. Sitting down to write this blog curation has been painful. I have been subconsciously and consciously avoiding my studio for the past few days, which is unlike me. I have still entered it. And I have still painted, and worked. But this question has been floating around my mind, and when it does, pulling and tugging at my heart. How do I want to “close out” this experience? What do I want you to know? What you know about my work, you already know. What do you not know about me?

    First, I view this is a continuation. What comes next will be a continuation of what has come before. It will become more personal. What will become of this blog space? That, I already know. I already imagine how and for what purposes I want to treat this habit, this *place*.

    Yet there is the sensation of conclusion in this experience. Of closure, of beginning. Of a deep emotionality. This is perhaps not the best painting I have ever made. It is, however, a painting about alignment. About being on a path. A deeply emotional and deeply troubling, yet extremely guided and awe-inspiring path. This painting may not sum up the entirety of my practice, but it sums up where I am and how I feel. The goat has become a self portrait for me. Perhaps it always was.

    My work is, and has been, about God. Jonathan wrote in the comments of my first Unit evaluation that it would be meaningful to learn what my ideas are about God. If that is not apparent in my work (in part I hope it is, in part I hope it will never be learned through my work alone) perhaps it is apparent in what I say. It is difficult for me to admit that I believe deeply in God. My instinct there is to even write “God, or my own understanding of it”, as a way to lighten or lessen the effect of those words. As though to say, I believe in God, but in a new-age-y more acceptable, more palatable kind of way. But not only do I believe in God, I believe I am deeply guided by God. That is what my work is about. It is also about the suffering that happens in the realm of God, the suffering we impart, and we inflict, often in the name of God. It is about love, suffering, pain, betrayal, grief, abandonment, loneliness, solitude, nature, and that feeling of being with God, even when, perhaps especially when, we are alone.

    This work is about my extremely personal relationship with God. My process is a connection with God, it is about intuition, being guided, and trusting. And this translates into the subject matter of my work.

    Thomas commented that while he believes the larger scapegoat that I did earlier on is a stronger painting, this painting has a dynamicity to it – a movement. It is in motion, it suggests moving forward, while the other is static. This paining is about moving forward from a place that feels stagnant. Moving forward even when it is into the unknown, but that unknown is so paradoxically comforting, so ‘known’. I have learned from this course how to stay in motion. The boat might not stay even keeled. It might flip over. Actually, I have come to hope and pray that it will flip over. I have come to become deeply comfortable on rough seas, deeply comfortable, deeply trusting of waves that rock me to my core. Deeply comfortable with making * shitty * work, to be violent in my experimentation. To ruthlessly experiment. More on that later. I have come to learn how to find that knowledge, even when it is obfuscated. Especially when it is obfuscated. I have learned that trying to find that knowledge is the knowledge itself. It is the seeking of knowledge that teaches us, not knowledge itself.

    1. Present evidence of a body of work that demonstrates a systematic enhancement of your knowledge and understanding. (AC Realisation)
      • MA Fine Art: Viewing Room (Virtual Gallery Space)
      • Presentation of my work: Over the course of my work, the many paintings that I have done, my work has evolved from being highly detailed and meticulous, into something incredibly loose and abstract; expressive, and often times raw, into something that I hope encompasses the two approaches. I have become more patient, and put many hours into painting small details, making my work exact, descriptive, and tighter, while I also spend time working unravel the need to make my work precise and exact, and trusting the immediacy and emotionality of it, the rawness of it, when it should prevail. I take pride in having work that is easy to read now, and that is “tight”.
      • Realization of my work: Recently, I have found myself looking at one concept deeply and doing work that results in multiple iterations (three iterations of an animal lost in the wilderness, three iterations of the hero’s journey with an animal, and three iterations of my dream of the scapegoat in a boat). This gives me the opportunity to ‘flesh’ my ideas out, sometimes large, sometimes small.
      • Overall, I think my work is become more precise and more clear, and I have more control. I feel, often, and I am leaning into when I don’t, that I have dominion over my work – this is a word I have been meditating on.
      • Knowledge and understanding OF and ABOUT my work. I have grown to understand not only more about the topic that I am researching, towards which the research paper was immensely helpful, but I have come to understand what MY work is about, and why I am making it. I will break this down into subconcepts:
        • Knowledge – where am I getting my knowledge? I am looking at myth (Greek myth, biblical myth, hagiographic myth, the overlap of biblical myth and hagiographic myth explored in my essay, fragments of literature, looking to everyday life).
          • Continuous research on The Scapegoat, a visit to the Lady Lever art gallery, and a possibility on the horizon to speak and engage personally with a scholar from the Lady Lever art gallery who is an expert and has done extensive research on the painting of the Scapegoat by Holman Hunt.
        • The understanding both of what I am painting about, and of what my work is about, and what the main themes and concepts are that drive it. On the one hand, I aim to understand better the main themes of my work (knowledge). On the other hand I try and understand better what my work is about, and what those main themes in fact are. To understand not only the field and context of my work, but to understand my work itself better. This process is ongoing, and will be explored in the next learning outcome.
    2. Synthesise and critically reflect coherently on your process whilst providing evidence of an active, independent and/or collaborative practice. (AC Process)
      • Synthesise: The main themes in my work.
      • Critically reflect:
        • I have been asking myself deep, critical questions:
        • The goat is a mirror of myself, and I hope a mirror for the rest of humanity, raising questions and ideas about:
        • The hand that guides, or the hand that wakes, as I write in my video. 
        • Looking at myth as a way of understanding how these ideas have roots in the past, and to better understand where to take them. Placing them within a historical context. 
        • SENSE OF PLACE; nature, the nature of where I live, the places that are important to me. Focusing on a sense of place early on in a painting as a sort of spiritual ‘anima’ to the painting – the painting’s core and soul. The wonder we can feel in the wilderness, and the sometimes crushing feeling of a presence of god. That relationship that exists in our dying moments. 
          • The suffering sewn into these lands, the places of memory, as I explore in my video. 
          • Self portraiture; in a more direct way, with Iphigenia as a physical and emotional mirror for me. Self portraiture through my own identification with the goat, and the goat as a vessel for my processing of everyday life.
          • Process
          • Independent and/or collaborative practice
            • Intuition, a collaborative process with God.
            • MA Final Show at CSM in June 2024
            • Exhibition in New York at Sapar Contemporary – In January of 2025, I will be showing my work in a solo exhibition at a gallery in Tribeca, Sapar Contemporary. During my tutorial with Jonathan, we discussed ways in which the spoken word or written word might be woven into the works, or become part of the experience of viewing those works. I plan on making sculptural work for this show, and bringing large paintings. I will continue to work between now and through the summer, and through the fall to prepare for this show. I already have a plethora of work that could potentially be shown, but I will continue to work vigorously to have a wider selection to choose from and continue to make even stronger work. I have a list of works that I want to make between now and then. Additionally, I will be researching a curatorial figure for this exhibition. I plan on meeting with an academic from the Lady Lever art gallery in Liverpool who is an expert on the Scapegoat painting by Holman Hunt, the painting that has triggered the vast majority of work I have made on this course. I will explore ideas with her, and this will give me context on where research on this topic is today. I hope this will lead me towards a view on the academic horizon of this field today. I will discuss the curation of an exhibition that is based around the concept of the Scapegoat, as Holman Hunt painted, in a contemporary context today.
    3. Summarise and evaluate your overall progress and formulate a constructive plan for continuing Personal and Professional Development. (AC Communication)
      • 5 minute video
        • What is this video about? It is about the same concepts that my work is about. The idea of the scapegoat, reinterpretation of myth, in this case biblical myth, in a contemporary setting, a relationship with God, betrayal, abandonment, nature. Here are a few key aspects of the video that will help with its understanding, a sort of guide:
          • Sound: the sounds present in the video are sounds generated at a frequency of 0.5 hertz, which I created through a generator in box and sawtooth waveforms (sound waves in which the alternating amplitude, or the actual visual shape that the wave takes, resembles a ‘box’ or ‘sawtooth’). I utilized a sound generator to create these sounds. I found that only square and sawtooth waves were audible at 0.5 hertz, while wave and triangle waves were inaudible. Sometimes I let the waves play out in a repetitive fashion, which occurs when the waves sound like a heartbeat, or continuous intermittent thumping. Other times, I created new sounds by scrubbing over the waves and then recording that sound – which is when the sound sounds like a ‘womp, womp’. At other times, I rerecorded the waves at different decibels, sometimes raising the decibel, other times lowering it, which is when the sound seems to come in and out, or grow in descend. Alternating these methods – scrubbing, loops of steady waves, and varying the decibels, I was able to create a wide range of variety. The purpose for recording these sounds is because I researched the frequency of the sounds that are generated at the Dead Sea. I found these two articles that have gathered sound frequencies generated at the sead sea while I was researching the Scapegoat painting by Holman Hunt, the Scapegoat concept, contexts, traditions, texts, rituals, and history. During this research I found that the majority of the recorded sounds at the Dead Sea were at the 0.5 hertz frequency. Therefore, I wanted to generate a soundtrack of sounds generated at the frequency of the Dead Sea – the place where the scapegoat painting is set. In my video, I reimagined the place of the Dead Sea in my own fashion – recording at a place that to me is special, and that has already appeared in my painting before – an abandoned animal pen that is high up on a mountain above my house.
    • Cont.
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          • This place to me is an archetype or symbol of the same place of the Dead Sea – a place of abandonment and a place where the higher power exists. This is the sense of place that I wanted to convey in my video.
          • Interpretation of myth from the Bible: I am obsessed with the myth of the scapegoat, and I have been reading the Old Testament in an old bible that I found in my house, which interestingly was a gift from the governor of Ireland to my father. It is bound in red leather with a red leather outside case, and golden gilded pages. I read the actual passage of the scapegoat in Leviticus in this book, which was very meaningful for me. To reinterpret it in my own way was a fascinating experience.
    • The part in the video where Thomas draws on chips of wood and puts them into an iron beaker is my interpretation of the process of choosing lots in the Bible. In the passage of the scapegoat, and elsewhere in the Bible, the process of “choosing lots” is mentioned, however I could not for the life of me figure out how this process was made. It turns out that there is speculation, but no certainty today on how this process was actually carried out in biblical times. Choosing lots is a way of ‘drawing straws’, as we would say today, to decide an outcome or fate. In the case of the scapegoat, two goats are chosen – one to be sacrificed, and the other to be sent to “Azazel” – or to be banished into the wilderness as the scapegoat. Some of what I read implied the choosing of lots to happen as a drawing of tokens that could emerge only one by one from a fine nozzle beaker. I imagined some kind of abstract symbol to be drawn on a chip or a coin, and inserted into the beaker, which each exiting one by one, only one fitting through the nozzle at a time. Each chip of wood would coincide with one animal and their fate, thus deciding which animal was to be banished, and which to be sacrificed.
    • The spoken word, written word is paramount in this video, as I narrate it with a poem that I wrote.
      • I also did this with my 3 minute video, which is set with a track of a text that I wrote about a real life situation in my village where I live that I witnessed from afar; meeting Gino on his third day of life, and witnessing his journey from afar.
    • The video also deals directly with the relationship of man and animal, and man and nature, and animal and nature, and the relationship of these three elements with God, as entities in contact with God, or derivations of God itself. How these four aspects interact with one another is something that I look at in the video. Moreover, the scapegoat acts a metaphor for our relationship with nature and animals, and our relationship with ourselves. The scapegoat is simultaneously a symbol of something external we interact with, as it is a symbol mirroring our own deepest selves.
    • The red ribbon is a recurrent theme in the video, as in the myth of the scapegoat, a red wool, or a red ribbon, is tied to the horns of the goat, to represent all of the sins and suffering of the people and community. I researched this concept also while reading about the Scapegoat – trying to understand where this idea comes from. There is no mention of the red (scarlet) wool or ribbon in the Bible, so I wanted to understand its context – from which traditions it arises (the Mishnah is one source, but there are many other earlier sources as well, such as the Greek Epistle of Barnabas <likely from between 70 and 131 CE> and the text “Against the Jews” by Carthaginian church father Tertullian <ca. 160-225 CE>). As the goat is banished, so are the sins and the suffering with it – literally latched onto, projected onto the goat. The goat carries this away with it, and the community is cleansed. The red poppy also comes into the video as a symbol of death. In Italy, the red poppy is a symbol of liberation and resistance, tied specifically to WWII and the partisan resistance, as a flower that grew in the battlefields in the spring. It is also however a flower tied to death – growing up from the large tombs that these battlefields became – a kind of way for the spirits and souls of the dead soldiers of the battlefield to grow through the earth and sprout towards god. The poppy is a funereal flower, in a sense, in this way. I show the poppy on the stone used to kill the first sacrifice as a way of representing the blood of the sacrifice, which is an important part of the scapegoat myth. It is also a poetic way of mourning the death of the sacrifice through this ominous symbol. It suggests simultaneously death and regeneration without being too obvious or too brutal.
    • Looking ahead: How will I move forward, what is next?
      • What does this all mean to me? When I started this course, I wrote in my application that I wanted to use this course to gain more conceptual awareness, understanding, and intention in my work. It has given me that, and much, much more. This process of growth is so fervent, and I have thought long and hard about what it will continue to evolve to be, and what steps I need to take regularly to keep this wheel turning:
        • Reading: continuing to read the Bible, Greek myth, about my favorite artists from the Renaissance and Medieval periods and beyond, stories about this twisted and contorted relationship we have with God and animals.
        • Being in my environment – being in contact with the ritual, strange happenings of everyday life, and the nature that surrounds me. Utilizing this space of my blog as a way to continue to process that everyday, and reflect on it. I intend for this blog to become more of a diary, a cabinet of curiosities to gather all of the strange and interrelated things that happen to me everyday, the gifts and the inspiration that gives food and water to my practice.
        • A big question is how I will continue my education. What does my education look like? First of all, I take responsibility for my education, my education begins with me and what I can give myself, which is something else that I wrote in my application to this course – that I knew from the get go that any improvement in painting, from a technical point of view, would be up to me. I wanted this course to give me conceptual awareness, and it did exactly that (and again, so, so much more). To continue improving technically and conceptually now will continue to be up to me completely.
          • Some questions I ask myself regularly: Which libraries can I go to in my surroundings to read documents and sources? What museums can I visit and revisit, knowing that they provide incredible fruit for my practice? (Example of visiting various museums with frescoes). Where can I continue to keep sourcing information and knowledge? What can I read? Whose paintings can I look at? What experience do I need to have? What do I need to see in person? How can I continue to be in the moment, processing things real time? (ie, witnessing, even if not in person, but real time, the solar eclipse, witnessing the aurora borealis from Italy, and thinking about bringing these themes into my work.)
          • I will continue to reflect on my work and the reasons for making my it; getting deeper and deeper at what my work is about, and what those themes are that drive it. Why is my work meaningful to me? Why are these themes important to me? What am I trying to say, and why? Why did I make this painting, and why do I want to make this painting? How could this painting be different? How is this painting bringing me to the next place, and what place is that? Why and how are these paintings related? Why is this a meaningful concept? Is this concept important for other people as well? Can people understand that concept from looking at this painting?
          • Having conversations with people is a huge part of my education. (As in our tutorials; tutorial with Betty, tutorial with Jonathan). I am intentional with my conversations and seek them out, whether that be with Thomas, the two gallery directors I am in contact with, fellow artists in my community, elders. Trying to continually see my work from new perspectives and probe at its meaning. This is a lifelong process and the people we encounter on this path help the practice grow and develop. The idea of ‘mentorship’ is something that I have been thinking of. Nina, the gallery director in NY, is someone I have known for almost 10 years, and who has been a mentor figure to me continuously. She is very knowledgeable and helps me a great deal in moving ahead and forward, in progressing – in pushing me to cross new boundaries and thresholds, criticizing my work, asking me deep questions about it, experiment with new mediums, pushing me to either break away from my academic background or to remembrance it more wholeheartedly – helping me teeter on this edge between the classical and the contemporary, the academic and the conceptual, the traditional and the explorative (as well as living in between society and living as a hermit – constantly treading this in between this space, this place on the razor’s edge; as an outsider and an insider, a foreigner and a local, I am the “tramite”, the translator, the funnel, the interpreter, the prism) ; and the Apollonian and the Dionysian. It is like a dance between these two worlds – you go too far in one direction, and have to pull it back into the other. I have to remember I am on that border consistently – simultaneously the outsider and the insider – a realization I had after my very first tutorial with Jonathan, and this is my value, this is a strength. It gives me a unique perspective – a unique viewpoint, as the Waywanderer on the Sea of Mist arriving to view the horizon from their unique perch, alone.
            • Nina has helped me also question my palette choices, asked me how comprehensible a work really is, and what context it lies in. She tells me things I should read or things I should look at. She is incredibly helpful from this perspective. She nurtures me. These kind of critical relationships are incredibly valuable, to force ourselves to view our work from a new viewpoint; to help us realize consciously what it is about. Each conversation I have about my work with someone different brings new perspectives. I nurture and seek these conversations out intentionally now.
          • Oxford hosts a number of short courses that I wish to take, and will begin this summer or this fall. There are courses on Renaissance painting and thought, biblical studies, Medieval thought and painting, and Greek mythology. My interests exactly are available in these courses, which is incredibly exciting. I can see my education become something much more self-directed and personal, in that I gather what I need and what I am interested in without necessarily working towards meeting specific academic outcomes.
          • On the other hand, I have looked into PhD programs as these have been an interest and goal of mine for a long time. The main programs I am interested in are the PhD in Art by Distance program at the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD in art at the University of Cork as I know and have spoken with two professors there who might be interested in supervising my work. It remains to be seen whether I would have to be present in Cork to complete a program like this. My main goal is to become a professional artist full time, so right now I am going to focus on that and explore what painting professionally looks like. If my practice seems to request a PhD style program, or if that seems to become something I desire to undertake, I certainly will pursue it. I will see what life after the MA course seems to develop into.
          • Lastly, a thought on hunting new ideas. Like Eustace, I am on the hunt for new ideas (and, they are on the hunt for me). Eustace hunts the deer, but it turns out to really be the deer hunting Eustace, which turns out to really be God hunting Eustace to convert him, and in the end, we can view this as Eustace really hunting for a new purpose. I feel that my practice is this exciting landscape or treasure hunt for ideas, finding them in the rugged nature behind rocks, in trees, in the sky, in the earth. Like the myth of Eustace, and that of Penthouse, it all comes full circle – a new beginning, a new meaning in life. Each painting I make feels like a rebirth. I am reborn with each painting I make. Each painting I complete feels like a beginning. This course feels so deeply like a beginning as it does an end. As it does a continuation.
          • And lastly lastly, I think back on this moment when I was finishing the painting of the church in my village on the coldest night of the year, having entered with my own key the custodian had left me in the hiding spot. I listened down into the valley and heard the baby goats who had just been born. The future was calling to me already. The ideas were already hunting me.

  • MA Fine Art: Viewing Room

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  • Planning works to bring to MA Final Show

    Imagining how a few different pieces look together…

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  • Ruthless Experimentation

    I have felt to become fearless, ruthless in my experimentation. I am doing things that once upon a time would have scared me, deeply. I am using gold leaf. I am trying to figure out whether this effect is too “sdolcinato” – too sweet, crafty, cheesy. But, I am forging ahead with it. I am doing things that might look ridiculous, but that is 100% ok, more than ok. I am sticking gold leaf down on wet paint – something that definitely should not be done. I am feeling like I am listening to that voice that is urging me to move forward. Sometimes in the past I was afraid of moving forward. Even with the new goat during the eclipse painting, I feel like maybe I should have left it earlier on. But there was a voice inside me telling me to keep carrying on. Ultimately, I do believe that that voice should be listened to.

    This is Heracles who comes upon the stag after having chased it for a year. Tireless, the stag kept carrying on. The stag is said to have been “as large as a giant boar” with brazen hooves and although female, golden antlers. “Heracles pursued the deer for a year, until it collapsed in weariness and he was able to capture it.” “Artemis forgave him because he had not killed it or spilled a drop of its blood”. This painting takes place in the moment that Heracles comes upon he stag, the stag calling out in utter exhaustion. The painting looked good before I added in the gold leaf. I think I still want to change the gold leaf slightly – refining the shape of the antlers.

    Adding in the gold leaf:

    Experimenting with transparent colors on top of a transparent gesso ground that I mixed. Trying to preserve this diaphanous transparency which gives it levity and a spirituality; makes it breathe. Gives it atmosphere. An emotipnality, and a rawness.

    And now, the experimentation of the paintings of the bulls:

    Beginning to draw in pastel underneath the oil paint, on top of a gesso ground that I prebought. I am experimenting with the different grounds – I was using a gesso ground that I was mixing with a glue and with water up until now. While this pre-mix goes on beautifully, I think it might be too absorbent as when I ultimately start painting all of the paint gets absorbed straight into the surface, making my darks sink in. But I like the little splotches of ground that have dripped onto the surface. This is a prime example of the kind of process-related things that I am not running from, but heavily leaning into in my work. Being in the moment and letting the process show. Letting the process teach me instead of trying to drive the process too forcefully. Letting myself be surprised by the things that happen on the way, and letting that shape the outcome, instead of trying to forcefully bring about a result that I think will be the best, because that’s the way I imagine it and want it. I am fully committing to the process.

    Now, on one of the panels I have covered it with a red background, and on the other panel with a gold leaf background that is heavily textured. This is the first time I am applying gold leaf, and I was getting extremely frustrated (likely because of other things in my life than because of the gold leaf). But I was still committed to letting the process guide me, and for me to guide it in turn. I am interested in the rawness that comes about when I stop trying to be perfect, when I am instead authentic. The gold leaf background has texture, is imperfect, but that reflects the concept I am trying to convey in this painting.

    Later, with the bulls drawn in,

    However, I was finding that I did not love the way the bull looked against a flat red background in the first panel. The idea of this painting is to paint in this red blood vomit that is coming out of the mouth of a bull, an image from a bullfight that I was extremely struck and hurt by. In the gold panel, there will be red blood coming out of the bull’s mouth, while in the red panel, there was meant to be gold blood coming out of its mouth. But I didn’t like how the red panel was looking, so I kept experimenting, wondering what it would look like if the entire bull was made out of gold. A part of me kept saying ‘don’t do that’, in part because one isn’t supposed to put gold leaf on top of oil paint that hasn’t dried, because it will prevent the blood paint from drying in the future and could cause archival issues. But I said, who cares, I need to ruthlessly and fearlessly experiment right now. That feeling of getting my hands dirty, of fearlessly moving forward to see how something looks – this is a feeling that I didn’t feel so comfortable with in the past. The fear of making something that looks like shit, this was a hard thing to sit with in the past, but now I feel like I am moving towards this feeling, moving towards this outcome, like the goat moving towards the eclipse on the horizon. I am seeking this feeling, I believe that if I am having that feeling, something good must be happening, I am setting myself up for success in the future. I must be doing something right, I am *moving* something, stirring something. I am not stagnant. I am moving, like the goat on the boat.

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  • Some gathered research on the Scapegoat

    Scapegoat research

    The Jewish understanding of scapegoat had a more literal meaning. The high priest would lay his hands on a goat and would symbolically place the sins of the people on that animal (Leviticus 16). Then they would drive that goat out into the wilderness, away from the people. Symbolically sending the sins of the people far away from them.

    Scholars have previously noted that in the Book of the Watchers the scapegoat rite receives a striking, angelological reinterpretation in incorporating some details of the sacrificial ritual into the story of its main negative hero – the fallen angel Asael. Thus, 1 Enoch 10:4-7 reads:

    And further the Lord said to Raphael: “Bind Azazel by his hands and his feet, and throw him into the darkness. And split open the desert which is in Dudael, and throw him there. And throw on him jagged and sharp stones, and cover him with darkness; and let him stay there for ever, and cover his face, that he may not see light, and that on the great day of judgment he may be hurled into the fire. And restore the earth which the angels have ruined, and announce the restoration of the earth, for I shall restore the earth ….[3]

    https://www.marquette.edu/maqom/azazelscapegoat.html

    Pharmakos ritual of Ancient Greece 

    Casting lots

    In the ancient world, however, casting lots was universally viewed as a form of divination by which the will of God was revealed.

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    https://escholarship.org/content/qt61z5g1mt/qt61z5g1mt_noSplash_b0c5a3019446be18ec9dccb46348c63a.pdf?t=q7c0t3#:~:text=Several%20Jew%2D%20ish%20and%20early,the%20community%20and%20the%20sanctuary.

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    https://www.thetorah.com/article/scapegoat-the-origins-of-the-crimson-thread

    **While in Jerusalem, Hunt had met Henry Wentworth Monk, a millenarian prophet who had distinctive theories about the meaning of the scapegoat and the proximity of the Last Judgement. Monk was particularly preoccupied with Christian Zionism.

    Hunt chose a subject derived from the Torah as part of a project to convert Jews to Christianity. He believed that Judaic views of the scapegoat were consistent with the Christian conception of the Messiah as a suffering figure. He wrote to his friend Millais, “I am sanguine that [the Scapegoat] may be a means of leading any reflecting Jew to see a reference to the Messiah as he was, and not as they understand, a temporal King.”[3]

    The Book of Leviticus describes a “scapegoat” which must be ritually expelled from the flocks of the Israelite tribes as part of a sacrificial ritual of cleansing. In line with traditional Christian theology, Hunt believed that the scapegoat was a prototype for the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus, and that the goat represented that aspect of the Messiah described in Isaiah as a “suffering servant” of God.

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    Scapegoat takes place in sodom, with mountains of edom in background

    The reaction to the painting was not as Hunt expected. In his autobiography Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt relates the first reaction to the painting by art dealer Ernest Gambart:

    Gambart, the picture-dealer, was ever shrewd and entertaining. He came in his turn to my studio, and I led him to The Scapegoat. “What do you call that?”
    “The Scapegoat.”
    “Yes; but what is it doing?”
    “You will understand by the title, Le bouc expiatoire.”
    “But why expiatoire?” he asked.
    “Well, there is a book called the Bible, which gives an account of the animal. You will remember.”
    “No,” he replied, “I never heard of it.”
    “Ah, I forgot, the book is not known in France, but English people read it more or less,” I said, “and they would all understand the story of the beast being driven into the wilderness.”
    “You are mistaken. No one would know anything about it, and if I bought the picture it would be left on my hands. Now, we will see,” replied the dealer. “My wife is an English lady, there is a friend of hers, an English girl, in the carriage with her, we will ask them up, you shall tell them the title; we will see. Do not say more.”
    The ladies were conducted into the room. “Oh how pretty! what is it?” they asked.
    “It is The Scapegoat.” I said.
    There was a pause. “Oh yes,” they commented to one another, “it is a peculiar goat, you can see by the ears, they droop so.”
    The dealer then, nodding with a smile towards me, said to them, “It is in the wilderness.”
    The ladies: “Is that the wilderness now? Are you intending to introduce any others of the flock?” And so the dealer was proved to be right, and I had over-counted on the picture’s intelligibility.

    — William Holman Hunt, loc cit.[4]

    Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in a letter to William Allingham in 1856, called the painting “a grand thing, but not for the public”. Ford Madox Brown wrote in his diary: “Hunt’s Scapegoat requires to be seen to be believed in. Only then can it be understood how, by the might of genius, out of an old goat, and some saline encrustations, can be made one of the most tragic and impressive works in the annals of art.” Ernest Gambart, as related by Hunt, was less enthusiastic, and was later to remark: “I wanted a nice religious picture and he painted me a great goat.”[5][6] The Art Journal in 1860, at the time of the exhibition of Hunt’s later work The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, was to characterise the painting as “having disappointed even his warmest admirers”.[7]

    At the time of the exhibition of The Scapegoat itself, in 1856, The Art Journal questioned Hunt’s eye for colour in the painting, casting doubt that the mountains of Edom, seen in the background, really were in actual appearance as painted – which Matthew Dennison, writing in The Spectator in 2008 described the Manchester version as “Day-Glo striations of lilac, crimson and egg-yolk yellow”. Dennison suggests the possibility that Hunt was painting the scene from memory, when he was finishing the painting in London after he had returned from his trip to the Dead Sea, and mis-remembered it.[8] Evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton, who saw the painting as a boy and was deeply impressed by the “sci-fi book cover” intensity of it, wrote after visiting Israel that “now on the shores of the Dead Sea I knew that I saw exactly the background I had remembered…if anything more exceptional, more other-worldly, than the painting had made them.”[9] Hunt’s own description of the landscape that he painted is that “never was so extraordinary a scene of beautifully arranged horrible wilderness. It is black, full of asphalte scum and in the hand slimy, and smarting as a sting – No one can stand and say that it is not accursed of God.”[8][10] Art critic Peter Fuller, in 1989, described the landscape of the painting as “a terrible image […] of the world as a god-forsaken wasteland, a heap of broken images where the sun beats”.[10]

    Dead Sea frequency:

    with fundamental frequencies 0.1, 0.2, and 0.1 Hz, respectively.

    Thirteen reference stations are located on rock, at distances of 1–10 km away from the basin, which recorded vibrations in the range of 0.1–0.5 Hz, generated in the Dead Sea basin.

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10950-018-9799-9

    Dead Sea is 80 km long and 13 km wide, -407m below mean sea level, makes it the lowermost surface on the face of the earth.

    The soaring hot and dry conditions of this region mean that large quantities of water are evaporated. This leads to the salt and other minerals becoming more and more concentrated. The water of the Dead Sea is characte- rized by very high salinity; it has 345 grams of mineral per liter (34.5% or 34.5 g/100 mL). This salt concentration is about 7 to 10 times that of the oceans [2]. The composition of minerals in the Dead Sea is particularly renowned for its healing and anti-aging effects on the skin. This is not merely a beauty fad. Through the years, modern medicine and science have clinically proven the skin benefits of Dead Sea elements. In fact, many dermatological patients from all

    over the world are sent to the Dead Sea by their treating doctors. The secret of the Dead Sea effect is in the naturally pure, intensive and powerful minerals ab- sorbed by the skin every time it comes into contact with Dead Sea mud, water and salts [3]. The great benefits of Dead Sea water, which were caused by the high salinity rate, have made it interesting for us to study its dielectric proper- ties. The concentration of salts in water affects its microwave dielectric proper- ties, which can be seen by comparing these properties with that of distilled water at various frequencies. It has been observed by [4]; that over the frequency range (200 MHz – 1.4 GHz), the dielectric constant of pure water remains constant, whereas that of saline water decreases slowly with increase in frequency. It is also observed that the dielectric loss of pure water increases with increase in fre- quency whereas in the case of saline water it is found to decrease with increase in frequency.

    <there appears to be a link between the frequency and the concentration of salinity – with saline water, dielectric constant of saline water decreases slowly with increase in frequency>

    Click to access jamp_2021122111383282.pdf

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  • While I was working on this painting, I was inundated with doubt. Doubt about whether I was overworking it, mixed in with the doubt that leaving it at it is would be enough. That voice that tells me to keep going, and the courage to listen to it, is ever-evolving, and becoming more and more pronounced. When I don’t like something in a painting, I keep working. If I keep working, there is a reason.

    Here are some recent thoughts from my paintings:

    These paintings are about the suffering that we inflict on beings, animal beings. They are about pain, about the conflictual nature of ourselves – we have at the same time immense empathy and immense ability to cause pain. They are extremely emotional – I am leaning in ever more to the emotionality of my paintings. The emotionality and sentiment of sacrifice. They are about absolute cruelty. How does this cruelty relate to a higher power? Betrayal. How can we do certain things in the name of God?

    These paintings, and most significantly these animals – recently, most often the goat, are also mirrors for ourselves, symbols. Visual metaphors representing ourselves, our truest and deepest fears, our relationship with a higher power, our alignment with the universe. In a personal sense, I have grown to understand the goat as a mirror for myself

    Looking back at this painting, I see how subconsciously mirroring is becoming evermore present. I have rendered conscious this notion of the goat mirroring myself, a self portraiture of sorts – a way of utilizing the goat to imagine my own journey, to process the things that happen to me on a daily basis (the eclipse, witnessing the aurora borealis here in Italy, my wonderment with nature, solitude, relationship with God). Interestingly, the reflection of the boat on the water, the blue of the eclipse mimicking the blue on the boat, mirroring is also visually present in this painting.

    In a more positive light, my paintings are also about gratitude. In this particular work, the goat is in motion – the goat is ever so slightly more in dominion over the boat – over his journey. The alignment with the eclipse, on the path of totality – suggests that the goat is being protected by God, guided.

    In a way, this painting is about the scapegoat being empowered. The scapegoat empowering itself. He is another victim, but he seems to be going somewhere, floating, but also driving the boat to a degree. sailing off into the sunset, into the eclipse, into the unknown. I looked at The Waywanderer on the Sea of Mist for this painting, because that sense of mystery – of dominion and simultaneously being humbled, nature as the great unknown, the power and force of nature, looking out onto the horizon, reaching a viewpoint, the lonesomeness that somehow isn’t alone at all – I wanted to repeat this in my painting.

    Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog.jpeg

    I have noted that I work well large. I really identify with the physicality of it – the freedom of gesture translates into beautiful mark making, and a freedom of my hand and arm. It feels good, right.

    I have also been thinking about the notion of a painting as a window. This is a concept I came across in the book “Figure” by Riccardo Falcinelli. He talks about the advent of the square canvas, and how this propelled forward a notion of capturing a moment as a window, or portal, onto another reality. Where the confines of the painting end suggest the continuation of this word beyond the borders. I was aiming in this painting to achieve a sensation of blowing open a window, a portal, and seeing this. The greatness and vastness of this view onto the eclipse – almost competing for the foreground with the boat, as though the eclipse was coming forward. A sense almost of the eclipse growing, growing towards the viewer, in motion, moving, expanding.

    In this way, this painting is also a view into another world. There is a sense of otherworldliness, although I want it still to be grounded in this universe. Like the painting of Iphigenia, it teeters on a line between this world and the next – that space between this realm and the next – just balancing on the edge. Looking beyond, yet still grounded, planted here. I often think about how I, like this painting, or this space in painting, inhabit the space between two worlds – I am simultaneously the outsider and the insider. I straddle the contemporary and the classical. I am neither here nor there, which means I am SIMULTANEOUSLY here AND there.

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  • Painting plans

    Today I worked a lot on this painting. I was concerned that I was overworking it, but I think I needed to bring it to a place of being almost overdeveloped – too pushed in one direction, in order to bring it back down now. I am planning on waiting for it to dry, then toning down the light and the blue of the eclipse to make it appear set further back in the background. Then I will look at the boat and see if it is working. I need to leave it for a few days I think – some paint needs to dry. The eclipse is too sharp and bright. But I think that overall the colors are probably working better. the huge difference between the blue of the sky before and the purple in the water was feeling too separate. Ill give it some time and see how I’m doing.

  • On the Path of Totality

  • Painting updates

    I’m annoyed because the sky seems to still be too blue. I’m slowly trying to tone it down but just I think I need to seriously apply some more paint and repaint that sky.

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  • Painting updates

    I’m annoyed because the sky seems to still be too blue. I’m slowly trying to tone it down but just I think I need to seriously apply some more paint and repaint that sky.

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