When I saw my father shortly after he died, the first thing I did was touch his face. To this day I don’t really know why. To make his death tangible and real? To say goodbye? To tell him I loved him? Maybe all of these, but whatever the case I vividly remember the sensation - I had never done such a thing when he was alive. It would have been unthinkable to just reach out and touch his face like that.
For the next couple of weeks I had a powerful sense that I wanted to make a painting about my father’s passing, but didn’t have a clear idea at all what such a painting would look like. But then I remembered Egon Schiele’s deathbed drawing of Gustav Klimt, and I realized the image of the deceased Klimt could allow me to address my father’s death indirectly.
Next I posed Emmie, our South African mastiff, backlit at the top of our basement stairs, bright daylight behind her and the dark basement stairs in front. She was as liminal – as “between” - in reality-based space as one can get; this opened up the metaphor I needed to paint about my father’s own liminal state - from living to dying, from life to death. The addition of a cast of one of the dead of Pompeii at the top of the door helped insert the sense of pathos I felt when I saw some of them in Italy; the experience was as powerful and as unknowable as being in the presence of my dead father, touching his face.