Okay, so this one is called Maiden Fleeing from Death. I had to look it up myself. My best guess was just Maiden and Death. I sort of had the general idea from a very vague recollection, but what I did know – right from the start – is that it’s from the 1998 Pissers and the Fear of Death series. It had occurred to me that maybe it was just called Fear of Death, so either way, I wasn’t that far off.

But anyway, this one is from a series that I did, you know, 28 years ago now, so I can’t be expected to remember all of the details. These paintings were done in Buffalo, New York, and they’re all (mostly) fairly small. I doubt that this one is more than, I would think, maybe 15 by 12 inches or so. I don’t have the dimensions available to me right now, but most of these were less than two feet by three feet, and those were the biggest of them – the ones that were two feet by three feet. Most of them were done on scraps of canvas that I kind of think were salvaged from the 1994 paintings that had been damaged. I think that that’s what I was painting on when I made these – canvas scraps from previous paintings.

This one, Maiden Fleeing from Death, is similar to a couple of others. One of them is sort of a companion piece called Maiden Reaching for Death. There’s also one of Persephone, with the pomegranate seeds. They all have this same sort of red background with the female nude in the foreground (probably a bit of a reference to the similarly colored background in some of the Pompeii paintings – or was it Herculaneum?). This one shows some underpainting that looks like it was probably a completely different composition that I then worked over. I think that’s the case because the figure in the upper right doesn’t look like what I would ordinarily depict as death – although it works out pretty well here, I think.

I think that’s all, I’m gonna tell you about these. They’re small, they’re done with oil and then encaustic. They have grommets in the corners. And, um, I’ll talk about them more when, uh, when other paintings from this series come up.