One More Painting To Do

www.justgiving.com/agracefuldeath to donate to the wonderful St Barnabas House Hospice that is helping me with this exhibition and who danced Steve out of this life
www.antonarolls.co.uk for my painting website
antonia.rolls1@btinternet if you want to contact me

One more painting to go. I have only time to do a final one, which is going to link the image of the dead Steve to the crucified Christ. What better image have we in our Western culture, of grief and death, than Christ Crucified? I shall concentrate on only Steve's face and will find a way of making this final painting work. I have in mind many of the old masters who used dead criminals as models for their post crucifixion paintings. I have no interest in making Steve into Jesus, I don't want the cross, the nails, the pose. I want the face, the dead man. I feel my grief, looking at my beautiful man, was as powerful as any who followed Jesus and saw him dead. Grief is grief. I want the power of the old masters to be displayed in my paintings. I respond deeply to the dreadful images of Christ in Bosch's , "Christ Carrying the Cross" and Mantegna's "Dead Christ" and Holbein's "Body of Dead Christ". It is the grief and the power and the reality of death that I want to show, it is the rawness I felt. Hopelessness. He had gone and that was desparately final. Of course, Jesus resurrected, so that was one step further than us lot. Steve didn't resurrect, and I don't think I know of anyone who knows anyone who did.

I have the wood prepared. I don't know what form the painting will take, it is forming in my mind and I am very much looking forward to starting (and finishing) it.

Keep you posted.