I’ve just made my epic painting, The Battle of Good and Evil, available for sale for the first time! I made this painting in 2013, three years before I started making landscape paintings, and although this is a landscape painting too, it’s not exactly in the impressionistic style that I currently work in.
The painting took my nearly a year to make, features over fifty characters and measures two by three feet. The left third of the painting shows the “good” side with its lush lawn and playful inhabitants. The right two thirds of the painting shows our heroes who have crossed the bridge and are fighting a skeleton army.
Top: Pieter Bruegel’s painting, The Triumph of Death (1562), Bottom Left: film still from the movie Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Bottom Right: detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (~1500)
My main inspiration for this painting was the artist Hieronymus Bosch (1450 - 1516) who is famous for his epic character-based paintings filled with fantastical creatures which often depicted a good and evil dynamic. I was also inspired by Pieter Bruegel’s painting, The Triumph of Death (1562), as well as video clips I’ve seen of the movie Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
The cartoon, childlike aspect of the painting came from the fact that I had originally created these characters for a family friendly interactive sculpture for the 2010 Figment Festival on Governors Island (in New York Harbor).
Exquisite Weapon, Governors Island, 2010
Made by my friend Chris Niederer, the sculpture’s half-bomb, half-seed design represented Governors Island’s recent transition from being a military base to a public park. Chris enlisted my help in creating the two-sided illustrated panels that allowed visitors to change what the overall image looked like by flipping the panels around to either a war-like or peaceful image.
I loved the characters I made for this sculpture so much that I decided to bring them back in the form of an oil painting. Below are some detailed shots, take a look and I hope you enjoy.
