Parable Paintings 2020-2021

Humans carve order out of chaos, through story telling.

From the earliest religious myths and narratives, to the lives of celebrities in People Magazine, these tales point to meaning and morality hidden beneath the specific events comprising human existence. They become fundamental to conceiving ourselves and the world as meaningful, comprehensible and, potentially, “just.”

Our need to understand the Covid-19 Pandemic was no different. Relevant tales exploded into our collective consciousness. Stories from the Spanish Flu of 1918-20; reprints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting “The Triumph of Death” (Bubonic Plague, 1563); an NPR reportage concerning Ernest Hemingway in quarantine with his wife and mistress due to Yellow Fever (1926); an article about Michel Montaigne’s invention of the Essay as a literary form during the Black Plague in southern France (1585); and tales from the current quarantine in newspapers, magazines, art galleries, on podcasts, radio and television: all of these to help us master our feelings of helplessness, and fit current events into some historical structure of meaning.

To what extent personal narratives, historical narratives, national narratives, literary narratives or any other method of ordering our world through story intersects with reality is open for discussion. But there is no doubt that the creation of understanding through story telling is fundamental to human experience.

The following visual parables honor our need to create story around our experience, scars grown around the original “sin” of existence. Though the following works may appear disparate from each other — in the same manner that the world presented by Stephen King is unlike that created by the Bhagavad Gita — like those, and all other literary works, the following pieces, are connected to the heart of being: the question mark around which all narrative is built, and is meant to remedy.

This selection does not attempt to ameliorate or answer the indecipherable question mark at the heart of existence, but honor it.