Deathliness

Since moving to Tucson I've been thinking about death a bit.  So, I've started painting a few death masks from 18th C Britain that are a part of the National Portrait Gallery collection.  There's something wonderfully relaxing about the image and process.  I mean, there's no tension in the physical attributes of the individual.  I wouldn't call it peacefulness.  It's more of an absence of the expected.  I find that appealing in some way.  The paintings are smallish, based on the size of the Musica Britannica that came out in the 60's & 70's.  I've been reading a lot of English Renaissance music--they had a thing for death and tears that I find very compelling, a liminal parallel to the conditions of our time, a bubbling sadness if you will.  So there's a relationship of the size of the surface to the size of the information I'm consuming, it's something familiar that you can hold in your hands. The paintings themselves are are hand made oils over egg tempera on chalk ground on panel.  There's a layer of rabbit skin glue between the chalk ground and wood panel too. It's nice to have all these parts and layers, somehow it helps buoy a little painting in a sea of history.