Inherently, narrative is a vehicle for the telling of human experience. Even the most fantastic of stories, when done well, reveal human nature with startling relevancy.

These paintings were created to celebrate the idea of the narrative. They depict the most widely known narrative with reverence for it’s cultural significance. This is the moment of the deposition. Where Jesus was removed from the cross. Some treat the words of the bible literally, others look for meaning within the stories.

I wanted to do justice to the subject matter and literal interpretation, while bringing attention to the narrative quality of the story with consideration of the non literal interpretations. To do this, I’ve recast the characters. The events were said to have happened so long ago that artists have been doing this forever anyways, but I wanted it to be more obvious.

With clearly contemporary subjects, the idea was to visually show the contemporary relevance of the story and narrative in general. How the subjects of the paintings serve as both contemporary stand ins for, and representations of the characters in the story. And subsequently illustrate an example how the same story can and does play out time again and time again, albeit with different contexts, across human experience.