I have a very Spanish Catholic Church in my neighborhood that still does processions through the streets. One of them involved rose petals which were all over the ground one day and I knew that I wanted to work that into a painting. I started thinking about Valentine’s and the use of rose petals to signify the visitation of the Holy Spirit which led me to learn about Lupercalia which got me thinking about sacrifice and moving out of a dark place into something more hopeful, and the ways the western world has traditionally practiced that concept in organized rituals. This painting is called “Latracalia” because I’m using coyotes instead of wolves. I like coyotes for this role as they’re very successful despite people vilifying and killing them. I guess that happens with wolves too, but to a lesser extent, and they’re not quite as tenacious and successful despite it all.
So really the painting is about attempting to move from a dark place into a more hopeful one, even though it often involves ugly, violent, dark, burning, sad weirdness and cobbling together concepts and rituals from whatever broken bits are at hand. A kind of any means necessary. In other words positive change is difficult and doesn’t always pan out, but it’s still worth trying.
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