The Transfiguration, Assumption, and Apotheosis of High-End Luxury Consumables

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This "surreallegory" uses current images and classic works of art to comment on a meta-religion that transcends the usual genres of world faiths: the deification of consumer goods--or, more simply, materialism. It was inspired by Jan van Eyck's altarpiece at Ghent, the writings and etchings of William Blake, and the Home Shopping Network.

Besides images of current photography, I stole/borrowed a number of images from works of art from the 15th to the 19th century, including Bronzino, Titian, Reni, and Correggio from the 16th century, Brumidi's 19th century fresco in the US Capitol building (the Apotheosis of George Washington), and other works. But most prominent in this image are the works of the 19th century French academic painter, William-Adolph Bouguereau, whose "licked finish" nudes were contemporary (!) with the explosion of impressionism in other French artists of the time, the etchings, paintings, and poems of the 19th century British revolutionary, William Blake, and the matchless Ghent altarpiece, The Adoration of the Lamb, by Belgium's 15th century Jan Van Eyck.

I have imagined a dystopian apocalypse, featuring a cult of shopper-believers who bear witness to the transfiguration of consumer goods into heavenly deities, abetted by media's relentess selling, and supported by the repression and exploitation of 3rd-world slaves, who produce our outsourced marketables. Some may notice a political statement as the dominant subtext.

I "paint" with digital images as my “medium” and software as my “brush”. I construct images in classic pictorial space (perspective, scale), using my own, as well as fragments of internet-available images, to build a virtual visual world—with sufficient implausibility to invite a surrealistic distancing, while preserving, I hope, an uncanny familiarity.

The image above is a digital "collage" of several hundred individual pictures and picture fragments, combined into one image in Photoshop. The original image file weighs in at over 4 gigabytes--42,600 pixels wide, by 6,600 pixels in height with some three hundred layers active at any given stage of development. Printed at 300 dpi, the picture is twelve feet wide. I have reduced the size somewhat for web display.