Sacrifice

 

This piece can be seen in a few ways.  Is the child being sacrificed?  Is the child being saved from being a sacrifice?  Is the blood in and on the altar fresh or old?  Both?  What's the story here?

As the observer, you get to make up whatever stories you like about an art piece.  Rarely do you get to hear the artist's thoughts when they were painting a particular work.  I will never be on a level with some of the big names.  I don't pretend to have that type of talent or patience.  However, I will use museum quality work as an example here.  

When I go to an art museum, I get to read background about the artist, and I get to read the titles given to their works.  However, when I look at a Van Gogh or even Da Vinci, I don't get to know what was in their minds as they painted.  I don't get to ask Picasso why he represented the world around him the ways he did.  These are people we don't get to ask.

When you have an opportunity to speak to an artist behind the work they've done, they usually have stories to tell.  On this one, I literally just started doing random blotches of white paint, and as they blended into each other, I saw someone holding up a baby to meet some unknown fate.  So that is what I decided to go with.  My person became an angel quickly.  The "unknown fate" became a bloody altar for human sacrifice.  I thought of all the Bible stories growing up about how the blood is what saves us.  A tale of Abraham going to sacrifice his son and being told at the last minute that he didn't have to after all.  The Bible's got it all, folks!  Human sacrifice, floods, incest, rape, murder, polygamy, concubines, music, poetry, gruesome gory horrifying deaths.  My head was filled with an unreasonable amount of rage and pain.  So I painted my own dead daughter as the child sacrifice, the angel representing organised religion sacrificing the well-being of our children for their twisted agenda.  The bloody altar is pretty self-explanatory, representing the number of people killed over beliefs, whether religious or societal.

This painting will never be a feel-good painting.  It won't be popular.  But it got out the emotions I needed to get out.  And that, my friends, is the entire point of my painting.

Healing and Freedom,

Jenny