Totem Poles Print

I started this painting while listening to a Dan Carlin podcast on the Munster rebellion. The absolutely gruesome punishments meted out to the Anabaptists who were the rebels made me feel the sort of revulsion that anybody would, and this translated into the theme for the painting. The painting was executed in different stages over the course of more than a month. The zeroth (preparatory) stage was fixing masking tape all around the canvas. The first stage was simply drawings of heads of humans and other fantastic creatures mounted on totem pole fashion in brown acrylic paint. The second stage was the coloring in the heads and poles. The third stage was coloring in the background with black acrylic paint. The fourth stage was an energetic background and foreground painting stage, where I splashed, dripped and flung small trails of paint all over the canvas. The fifth stage was where I painted 'Oms' in acrylic paint of different colors (mostly white, red and yellow or combinations thereof) all over the background, in an attempt to inject some peace into such a brutal theme for the painting. Stages four and five overlapped each other significantly. The sixth and final stage was using a Sharpie (permanent marker) to create designs all over the canvas. The painting was done on Dayler Rowney canvas that is triple primed with gesso, 100% acid free, stretched and ready to be hung. The depth of a pack of two canvases is listed as being 1.5 inches, but my own measurement of canvas thickness gave me a measurement of 0.6 inches (approximately). Daler Rowney acrylic paints and black Sharpies were used for the painting.