Foundations: Drawing

Tom Mills

Fall semester, 2013

Final project

 

We were to take a master painting from the baroque or renaissance period and compositionally analyze and reorganize it to "make it our own;" injecting ourselves and our own meaning into it. The first part of this involved an exactly proportioned scaled drawing of the original painting with an analysis of the composition. The painting I chose to work with is the Martyrdom of St. Matthew by Caravaggio.

I decided to base my composition off of a projection of sound waves from my violin, as the sound bounced from the soundbox and off the walls of the practice room, into my ears. The piece served as an aural expression of my past emotional difficulties I wanted to address in the piece (more below).

The original painting is of the martyrdom of St. Matthew, in which he is killed by a Roman soldier in a public place as bystanders look on with horror or flee. I decided to transform it into an allegory of suicidal depression, by representing each figure as a persona of myself. I am my killer and my victim. I am the interventionist and the enabler. The reacting personas display my varying stances towards the suicide scene . I am the terrified onlooker, the unaffected witness, and the entertained audience; all at once.

 

I decided to do this by putting my head on every figure from the original painting that I decided to keep (and inventing a couple new ones). It would cover the raw-nerve pain of the meaning of the scene with a layer of the absurd and keep it in check.