Category Archives: The Lebowski Cycle

The Lebowski Cycle – The Lamentation

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The Lamentation • Joe Forkan 2006-2011 Oil on Linen 72" x 40"

Here is another recently completed painting from The Lebowski Cycle. This one is titled The Lamentation, and I was working with a couple of specific Lamentation paintings in mind (by Rubens and Giotto), but I was also looking to the larger tradition of paintings dealing with this subject matter.

The Lamentation Peter Paul Rubens 1614 Oil on wood 41 cm x 53 cm (16" x 20.86") Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

What interests me about paintings from the Passion is the complex appeal to emotion that floats through them.

But that appeal is complicated by the passage of time and the shifting cultural context through which the work is seen, and by the conversation that surrounds the art (the historical importance of the paintings, the biography of the artist, the formal and stylistic structures of the depictions, etc.).

“…You look at the art of the Renaissance, mostly created by the Roman Catholic Church and commissioned by the Roman Catholic Church. Does Renaissance art as it has manifested itself over 400 years represent the church? It does not represent the church.

The kind of art we like today became the kind of art we like today because people took that art and used it for their personal ends. They disregarded its ideological content, and took it to mean something that they valued. So, if you like a Caravaggio today, that doesn’t mean that you believe in the Counter-Reformation principle of the communion, right? And so, well, then what do we like?

Well, we’re still figuring that out.”

— Dave Hickey

Meaning is always migrating. But with all of this ebb and flow, it can be a bit of a shock to wander through a museum paying close attention to the fact that, no matter what the intentions of the artists, a huge percentage of these lovingly crafted works of art are brutal, grizzly images of cruelty, torture, suffering, death, and grief. The body count is truly staggering. How many times have artists crucified Christ or skewered St. Sebastian?

Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), Cappella Scrovegni a Padova, Life of Christ, Lamentation (The Mourning of Christ)

And people complain about violence on TV and in movies…

“…There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never “plain,” nor appearances ever “sincere.” To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.”

— Dave Hickey (The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty)

The Lebowski Cycle – The Deposition from the Cross

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The Deposition from the Cross (After Pontormo) • Joe Forkan 2011, oil on linen, 72" x 40"

Here is a newly completed painting from the Lebowski Cycle. This one is loosely based on The Deposition From the Cross by Jacopo Pontormo. It is actually based as much on the tradition of  paintings that depict the Descent from the Cross, of which there are many versions.

The Deposition from the Cross Jacopo Pontormo - c. 1525–1528 Oil on wood 313 cm × 192 cm (123" × 76") Santa Felicita di Firenze, Florence

The Angels at Christ's Tomb Edouard Manet 1864 Oil on canvas 179.4 cm x 149.9 cm (70 5/8" x 59") The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Neither here nor there…

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Painting the Sea Cliffs near Ballycastle, June, 2010

My residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland has come to an end.

I was lucky to be in Ireland for a very temperate summer, and was outside nearly every day painting, exploring, or both. With daylight lasting from 4:30am until 11:00pm, there was plenty of time to work and enjoy being in such an amazing place.

I had planned on posting paintings to the site while in Ballycastle, but decided I’d rather be wandering around Ireland than staring into a computer screen.

I’ll put some work up soon.

(I finally got to see Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, which was in Rome when I arrived in Dublin. It is now back at the National Gallery. It was great to see it in person, especially after basing one of the Lebowski paintings on it.)

The Warmest Day of Winter

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The Warmest Day of Winter • Joe Forkan 2010 Oil on canvas 12″ x 12″

The demands of perceptual based painting are very different from the demands of more open-ended studio work. Large figurative paintings like those in The Lebowski Cycle can be in progress for years, and undergo significant revisions, but perceptually based paintings are more direct expressions, and the entire process of painting them is compressed into a very short period of time.

Trying to capture the specifics of an experience of a place, or of the presence of a person in one session forces you to really focus on what you want to capture in the painting, to make quick decisions and to jettison extraneous information.

Regardless of the quality of the finished work, I always remember a place that I have painted much more vividly having painted it than if I had just spent the day there as an onlooker. Interpretation demands engagement in a different way. Painting is a way of knowing.

Landscape painting also offers a counterpoint to the more solitary nature of studio painting. Yesterday, after spending all morning painting in the studio, the warm weather encouraged an afternoon run down to Newport Beach to paint at Crystal Cove. It seemed a shame to spend such an amazing day inside painting three figures in the interior of a bowling alley.

The Lebowski Cycle – The Supper at Emmaus

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Supper at Emmaus (After Caravaggio) • Joe Forkan 2006-2009 oil on linen 96"x 38"

This painting is based on Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus from 1601, which illustrates a dramatic moment from the story of Jesus’ resurrection. I was interested in Caravaggio’s take on the story because of his depiction of the moment of discovery, when the disciple’s “eyes were opened”, and for his symbolic use of the still life to reinforce the central idea of his painting.

Supper at Emmaus Caravaggio 1601 Oil on canvas 141 cm × 196.2 cm (55.5 in x 77.25 in) National Gallery, London

The symbolic references used in the paintings of this time period are somewhat obscure to us now, it is still clear from looking at the work that each figure, element, and gesture was an important consideration in the presentation of the story, all subsumed into the final image. One of the qualities that I most enjoy about narrative painting is that there is a clear story to be presented, but the specific events of the narrative give you great latitude for formal, conceptual or expressive shifts and digressions that can set a different tone or shift the story’s implications.

In my painting, I was looking to create a kind of visual and narrative tension between the figures, the dramatic space, and the still life, one that is suggestive of a larger narrative, and that hopefully moves beyond the specifics of the Jesus story, the Lebowski story, or the Caravaggio story, but retains a shifting, if uneasy relationship between all three, in addition to where I am trying to go with the content and the formal elements.

Detail from the Supper at Emmaus • Joe Forkan 2009

I hesitate to be any more forthcoming about my intentions for these paintings, in that I don’t want to set a specific read for anyone else. Painting is, after all, a language of its own and in this regard, I will let the paintings speak for themselves.

This painting was one of the most complex of The Lebowski Cycle. Its scale was daunting (96″ x 38″ / 243.84 cm x 96.52 cm), with 3 main figures that are slightly over life-size, and a deep space that I wanted to paint in a specific way. I wanted the background to be largely empty, but not in the way that Caravaggio’s paintings are empty, through the use of chiaroscuro (the contrasting effects of intense light and deep shadow). I was looking to represent space and to convey a sense of light and shadow through the relationships of large color shapes, rather than using a more dramatic recession into shadow.

This painting will be included in the Laguna Art Museum‘s exhibition The OsCene 2010 –  Contemporary Art and Culture in Orange County from February 21st – May 16, 2010.