Destruction of the Second Temple

oil on panel, 35″ x 27″, 2021

My conception of the Second Temple is from the Dura-Europos depictions (c. 230 CE). And these don’t contradict the contemporary-to-the-Temple image on the Magdala Stone (c. 70 CE, the year the Temple was destroyed), right, with its columns, menorah, urns and arches.

I wanted a sense of mourning, so I borrowed from Odilon Redon and put just a single figure in the landscape. And I wanted opera – theatricality. It makes me wonder why I’ve always been drawn to the non-naturalistic in favor of the dramatically symbolic. Neal Adams Comics? William Shatner’s Captain Kirk?

I think the previously unseen together clothing and styles of those Dura-Europos panels (a mix of Parthian and Roman cultures), makes their power for me like science fiction. What were to become the foundational stories of the Western world are at Dura-Europos seen as through the bottom of a beer glass, a glass onion, a glass darkly … From my twenty-first century perch Dura-Europos does not resemble James Tissot’s work (whose antiquity research was admirable), but more like a green, hairy puppet saying from long ago and far away: “attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed that is.”

Last, in my work I am trying also to emulate the feeling of the centuries, and the fragility of many of the 1800-year-old panels. And so I have painted worn corners and cracks and chips. On the other hand I didn’t want to do this in such a way that denied the paint. I like the tension between representation and betraying the means of representation, being honest about the humble muds and wood. Yet such simple things can transport. Wasn’t Lieutenant Uhura’s communication earpiece really a salt shaker?