The Question: Warren Criswell's Paintings

I didn't intend for this to be a series. It was just that one image spawned another, which spawned another, etc., in an image-breeding frenzy that went on for several years before I was able to break out of it. It was apparently a conflation of several sources. I know I had been reading Sartre's "The Question" in Being and Nothingness and Dostoyevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor," a chapter in The Brothers Karamazov, and I had surely been looking at El Greco's portrait of Cardinal Inquisitor Niño de Guevara. But I interpreted all this in terms of the döppelganger: a kind of Jeckel-and-Hyde, superego-id pair played by me as both the Grand Inquisitor and his prisoner.