10/16/2025
This is: A Painting in A Minor
Oil on canvas
This image began with the idea to have a dreamlike scene with little rooms underground, like a surreal frieze. That meant raising the ground plane to make space for this subterranean scene while the tree rises through a hole in the ground to show how these two environments correspond. If you look closely, the underground scenes are modeled after predella.
In and , the is the row of small narrative or devotional panels running along the bottom of the main image. Often these illustrate scenes from the lives of saints or Christ, or symbolic motifs that support the main composition above.
Among the weird forms inside the predella, the central vignette depicts a beheading.
Several saints were famously martyred by decapitation, like , , and , while the most often depicted is .
My intention was for this allusion to Saint John the Baptist to introduce a quietly profound countercurrent beneath the painting’s surreal surface. 🧐
The lower predella’s beheading scene recalls the archetype of prophetic sacrifice. His severed head, an emblem of vision without voice, reverberates through the dream architecture above, where form and meaning drift apart. The painting transforms the altarpiece’s devotional logic into a on and .
