Calcium

I first started gathering shells and bones from the beaches and forests in Wellfleet in 2015. By 2020 I had several shoeboxes full of debris and finally started painting pictures of them, sometimes portraying both front and back. By depicting them in such detail, I’ve tried to elicit simultaneously their carnal physical nature and the suggestion of something celestial or transcendent. Like the Plainsong Elegies, the images are painted close to the same size as the original objects, making them only a few inches across. Some are framed in Bob Mason’s maple boxes, others in conventional frames with window mats.

Recently I came across two passages by the seminal scholar of comparative religion Mircea Eliade that I find relevant to this series. He asserts that early hunting peoples felt that the core or quintessence of an animal’s life was concentrated in the bones. Additionally, imagery suggestive of birds and flight was associated with the ascendant soul or spirit in Paleolithic cultures the world over. Such imagery has persisted throughout history, evidenced most accessibly to us in depictions of departed souls as winged skulls on the 18th Century headstones in our old New England cemeteries.