3 Ages

Medium Description

"3 Ages" is an oil painting on canvas.

Artist Description

“3 Ages” is a new oil painting from my ongoing “Lands and Lore” series. Paintings in this body of work are inspired by the stories, histories, cultures, and landscapes of the Southeastern United States and depict places and structures that I find during my travels throughout the region. This series also derives much of its style and symbolism from Southern literature, especially from the writings of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. Strong lights and shadows, rural architecture, roadside oddities, and silhouettes are some of the pictorial devices that I use in my paintings.

“3 Ages” is an allegorical painting about time, spirituality, love, and loss. This piece uses visual symbolism about of the cyclical nature of time to contrast the human life cycle with an ancient landscape in the Blue Ridge mountains. I developed the ideas for my painting after seeing the “The Three Ages of Man” paintings by the Italian Masters Giorgione and Titian. In the paintings by Giorgione and Titian, the artists painted men at different stages of their life: childhood, middle age, and elder. These Renaissance masterworks are allegories of human life, and this was a subject that spoke to me personally when my son was born and my father passed within a year. I felt strongly fixed in the “middle age.” The defining experiences of new life and sudden death, and the strong emotions that accompanied them during what seemed to me like a relatively short period of time, were the catalysts for my need to create this painting.