Venus & Adonis Painting

this work features a found art history slide of Venus & Adonis by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio). Titian made a few versions of the painting. The slide is aging and the color has faded from it, making it red. Long version: I found this old slide viewer at a thrift store and decided to make a piece with it. The thought of physically handling one small image and peering through the viewfinder seems so romantic and intimate, so different then the hyperspeed rate at which images are presented to us today via social media. The slide is Titian's Venus & Adonis painting from the 1550's. All the cyan dye has faded from the slide, leaving it bright red. To me the image now seems more intimate, violent and although this is a bit counterintuitive, perhaps more contemporary. The image is slowly changing, and will continue to in the coming decades. I made a fifteen minute sketch in oils of a portion of the sky of the original painting. The side is spray painted to roughly match the bulky heavy metal of the slide viewer, and there are abstract areas kind of shining through the sketchy representational painting. My painting hangs above the slide viewer. Because of the color loss, it is difficult to tell which version of Titian's painting this is--there were quite a few. From the Met museum's website: "Tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses inspired Titian to paint what he called poesie, or poetry in paint. Here, Venus tries to stop her lover from departing for the hunt, fearing—correctly—that he would be killed. The mood of sensuality, conveyed by the beautiful depiction of Venus, seen from the back, enhances the viewer’s sense of the tragic end to this story, expressed through their exchanged glances and the frightened Cupid." Spoiler alert—Adonis dies.

Multi-paneled Painting:Spray Paint on Slide Viewer

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:30 W x 12 H x 5 D in

Number of Panels:2

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.