Matt Whitney Painting #1 - Annunciation

By matt

Annunciation, oil on canvas, 22″ x 28″

Going into this Residency, we were given the themes of The Beautiful, The Sublime, and The Grotesque. Before we left for Vancouver, I came up with the concept imagery in a sketchbook that I was going to do for my paintings. Without getting too heavily into the philosophies (for that, go read Plato, Kant, Alice in Wonderland, etc.) the one idea I kept coming back to, or the truth I was discovering, was that each of these concepts blend into one another. Beauty is not mutually exclusive from the Sublime, the Grotesque can be beautiful, etc.
As I have done in the past, I have used biblical stories to further my concepts. These stories are familiar to myself and hopefully as well to the viewer, and provide fascinating food for my imagination.
For my Annunciation, I thought about what would happen if the story of the Virgin Mary were to happen today in modern times. What if a friend came to you and said she had been visited by an Angel of the Lord, who told her she would bear the Savior of the World. If it were me, I’d think she’d gone cuckoo-bananas. That is the well upon which I drew for this painting. I have a stern angel shocking Mary out of bed (Rosetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini was one of the first to depict Mary in this fashion). On the right, beast-headed figures crash down her door, spilling into the scene and mocking her. A peacock figure bears a gift of prison bars. A fish carries a crimson dress, with which to replace the Virgin’s white one. The overwhelming pressure from both sides is driving her to the brink of insanity, as she begins to stare vacantly into space pulling her hair.
The theme for this painting is that beauty is fragile. We are constantly encroaching upon and destroying beauty - be it in the environmental disasters we inflict or our culture that pounces upon the breakdown of our celebrities (for reference, see any cover of Us Weekly magazine). Yet there is still beauty to be found in the world, and in our lives, if we would only seek it. Before you accuse me of being cliché (stop and smell the roses!) by “beauty”, I not only mean a physical representation of something pretty, but a universal, objective understanding and appreciation of the Good, and I hope thusly, Truth.