Description of work: Funeral Drawing
Community. A gathering of people. Why do we gather? To honor others, ourselves, the dead, the living?
This drawing is a study of mourners at a funeral. My grandmother, who in 1910 must have been about five years old, is among the crowd depicted in this sketch.
While the drawing is a portrait, it is also a homage to similar compositions of Romanesque works that decorated the walls of many European Churches in the 11th to 13th centuries.
Who were these people? What were they thinking at the mark of another’s death? Certainly individuals must have experienced a variety of emotions/thoughts.
Was my grandmother contemplating her own death--a death I witnessed in 1996—when she was just five at this funeral? What did any of the mourners think? The mourners who must all have by now had their own deaths mourned.
This drawing is my own contemplation of the subjects’ feelings as they are expressed through each portrait. It was drawn with my own |