Fear Not, Neither Be Afraid
toner, acrylic, metallic leaf, and wax on panel
23” x 19” - 2011
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Years ago my grandmother completed a paint-by-numbers kit of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, and it hung in my grandparents home amongst a room of treasured mementos that included family photos, rosaries, and WWII memorabilia. I photographed it one morning, marveling at how even when blurred to an extreme it remained iconic. After my grandmother died I created this work to remind me of the sanctity that resides in the work of our hands.
Fear Not, Neither Be Afraid toner, acrylic, metallic leaf, and wax on panel 23” x 19” - 2011
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Thomas Cole - Manhood (from Voyage of Life), 1840
Oil on canvas Permanent Collection of National Gallery of Art | Image via Wikimedia Commons (source)
There is no shortage of precedent for glorifying death with the luster of gold. Above is one small work in progress that nods to that convention even as humanity is completely removed from the honorific.
Another memento mori on its merry way toward an end I can't quite visualize yet. Just a few days ago it looked like this. . . Right now I'm just allowing this to be a reactive sort of process- with decisions made as they often are in life, in the wake of other decisions, some of which are good and some less so. You can try to whitewash certain elements, or perhaps scrape them away, with the hopes of starting fresh but ultimately some trace of what has come before always remains.
An excellent article regarding the relationship of dance (and its employed Eros) and death appeared in the Guardian today. . . soldier through the first paragraph and you'll be rewarded with some excellent analysis of the danse macabre, including the supposition that the x-ray instantly became a new form of memento mori for the modern era, and some exploration of examples in literature where the masques and ballroom antics of the elite are especially fecund ground for Death's harvest.
Read the complete article here. . . For those who know me well my inchoate foray into the memento mori genre will come with little surprise on the decline of 2012. It is a theme that somehow seems more relevant now that I'm a bit older-- less saturated with the laughable melodrama that infused so many early works of art when New Wave Goth and Anne Rice novels seemed like fine company any time I was without a girlfriend.
Which might be more candor than you're really seeking here. So, with regards to the memento pictured above, you are seeing a work that is very much in progress. A diptych created from two reclaimed canvases over a decade old, with the left being leafed in silver and awaiting an image from the hillsides that make up Cascade Head. The skull is derived from a photograph I took in France many years ago. It rests atop a bit of IKEA fabric that has been thoroughly permeated with powdered graphite. Last weekend included a foray to the Oregon Coast; a place that never fails to incite the imagination with its majestic combination of meteorological atmospherics and geologic drama. Like every other visitor to Cannon Beach I succumbed to the dynamic magnetism of Haystack Rock, but I did not allow it to blind my camera to nature's other realities. Here then is an utterly unencumbered picture of death the likes of which only a nature outside of human sentiment can conjure.
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For over a decade Jeffrey T. Baker has explored the elegiac and sublime through his mixed media artworks. He harbors an unapologetic predisposition for the decayed and imperfect.
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