About a year ago I had a show in Lynchburg, Virginia in a Church with a very nice gallery housed inside it. The Church is St. John's and the gallery is the Fauber Gallery . I was brought into the gallery by the Rector Michael Sullivan, and it turned out to be a great show. My original intention was to make a work specifically for the church show, a portrait of St. John. St. John is traditionally depicted as conjuring a serpent from a cup. Apparently the Emperor Diocletian offered St. John a cup of poisoned wine. St. John diverted disaster by turning the poison into a snake that slithered away (another biblical casting of snakes as villains, poor snakes). This of course interested me and I thought it would be great to create a work of my own on this subject. I'm drawn to the conjuration aspect of it, but I feel that none of the paintings I've found have struck me as amazing depictions. Unfortunately at the time of the show I was pressed to get everything else together and the St. John painting was the first to get cut. But, recently I've been playing with the idea to make this painting. And since the idea has stayed around for a year, I thought I'd go for it. Pictured here are some of the earlier representations I could find of St. John and said serpent, one by El Greco, another by Alonso Cano (my favorite of the bunch) and I'm unsure of the origin of the other two, though one of them appears to be a very early damaged illustration on a wall. I'm particularly drawn to this precisely because it hasn't been depicted too many times, there is no iconic image of this story. So...onward.
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1 comment:
Good post.
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