The prayer Painting

In 2014 I pushed this Baroque-Nuevo style into this series with compositions of biblical allegory by putting some modern thinking to a fundamental principle: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah 5:20. Like Caravaggio selecting models, I cast subjects who aren’t exactly the most “prized” or “savory” amongst our vain and socially stratified society. turn the meek and weary into angels and healers. I like to turn castaways and gangsters into martyrs. I offer them positions in high-art as historical documentation of what the meek look like in our modern age. The same as Caravaggio documenting biblical lore within his peer group of misfits and poor, dressed in their own clothes, shabby or not, just as they lived. As he lived. This is as much an empathic gesture as it is design. You see images of real people, flawed, tempted, tired and special. These subjects, the meek, are documented into art history fairly. They represent biblical lore as it would play out in our time. And though the subjects excite our insecurities and judgment, it is the socioeconomic and aesthetic subjectivity that I reckon with here: be wary of judgment lest you find collective moral bankruptcy. That’s the overall distillation of the Bible as a parable of morality.