Home: Familia, 2013 Oil on canvas Collection Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Gift of Dr. John Hunter and Dr. Harold Kooden, 2024.2.10

Familia: Home

In the series of paintings I’ve called Familia, I tried to find ways to express gay bonding in our created families in visual, non-sexual terms. It was a challenge. Much of the gay art that I’ve seen leans heavily on sexual content which is fine and accurate but gay life is about more than sex. It is about all of the things that folks experience in non-gay life. However, how does one depict the particularity of gay bonding? Familia: Home evolved out of something that I read in a novel. The author described seeing the dead body of his father lying on a bed and pondered many of his feelings towards his deceased parent. The idea of a prone dead body as an image intrigued me so, with a model, I created a nude study. The nude body then seemed the appropriate image for a painting that presented a person stripped of everything including life itself. I thought of Andrea Mantegna’s Dead Christ that, for me, captured that idea. However, visually, I didn’t want to use the foreshortened figure in Mantegna’s painting and, having decided against that, I didn’t think that a horizontally positioned figure would be a satisfying composition by itself. So, I added the seated nude figure who ponders the dead body and gives directional balance to the composition. Then, the painting made perfect sense to me. The two men were lovers—a family as well as “home” to each other. The living man contemplates his deceased partner who was his place of refuge and shelter that now was lost. The figures exist in an abstract setting—outside of time and place—that was inspired by illustrations in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. Finally, the cotton plant, a reference to black enslavement prior to Emancipation, and a turtle, a creature that exists within its own home, completed the image of gay bonding in a created family.