The irreverent trinity of jokers, jesters, and angels reveals a truism that we often choose to ignore: life is capricious. We build beautifully carved, benevolent spirits as guardians over our departed loved ones, but the tricksters abound, challenging their sanctity. These images come from my trips to the graveyards of Italy and France and incorporate antique tarot and playing cards from my collection. The juxtaposition of the tombstones’ concreteness and the pranksters’ whimsy highlights life’s unpredictability. The trumpet flowers and doves herald spirituality, and the three crows flying are symbols of luck. Depicting the tension between the stark monuments symbolizing hope past finality and the wild cards that pop up in everyone’s life are all pieces of a puzzle that stimulated the need to create a narrative series that is challenging, temporal, ethereal, and, hopefully, beautiful.
Realism: “a term sometimes applied to the work of painters who by means of an exact technique try to make plausible their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions”
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 1942