JADIS TU DÉTACHAS LES GRANDS CALICES… (You once unfastened giant calyxes…)
2023
30” x 24”
Oil, acrylic, shellac, gold leaf, clay on canvas.

Inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Les Fleurs (from where the painting takes its name), this piece has evolved over several months and experimentations and was one of the first explorations of working directly from and within a poem. One of the key developments in the process was the mixture of red and white into pink-ish hues which both reflected my feelings on the nature of its historical color symbolisms present in the poem itself (white for pure (lily), red for seduction (rose)) as well as engages with the haunting infrared war-zone photography of Richard Mosse, in his case utilizing a technology invented for war to photograph the effects of war, in my case taking that technique and encasing it within an older technique (oil) to further concretize the legacies and inevitable cycles of violence for the earth is no longer young, no longer innocent of scars.