The Golden Bough

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The Golden Bough

2019-2022

Oil Paint on Canvas

42″ x 62″

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The Golden Bough is a branch from a sacred tree that allows safe passage through the underworld. The mythology comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, an ancient Roman poem, written between 29-19 BC. In book 6, Aeneas journeys to the underworld to find the shade of his father, who presents him with a vision of his destiny. Before passing into the kingdom of the dead, Aeneas is directed by Apollo’s seer that in order to find passage he must first find the Golden Bough, an anomaly within the order of nature, hidden in Diana’s sacred grove. It glows with a discolored aura. As he searches for the bough two doves appear to guide him to the branch, sent by his mother, Venus. In the painting, the two illuminated globes felt like an homage to the twin doves and also create the discolored aura of the tree. The lamp with the dead bulb seemed to suggest somehow the land of the dead. 

The painting is Virgilian in method in the sense that is tempers passion with disciplined devotion to vocation and craft. Both are necessary. When I displayed the painting at Parlor Gallery, I chose to display the palette next to the painting and titled it Underworld. The palette gives insight to the passionate process of creation that the composed and finished painting conceals. The waste material of the process that would normally be discarded and forgotten is here to be seen as a vision of an underworld.

I worked on the painting for 3 years from 2019-2022, years of turbulence and transition. “The theme of great transition is, of course, closely connected to the virgilian sense of Vocation,” C.S. Lewis calls Virgil’s poetry, “the poetry of passion at war with vocation” in contrast to more spontaneous poetry we find in Homer, or any other form of impulsive expression. The mode of creation chosen with this painting was an intentional decision made to embody Virgil’s ideas about what values a poet or hero should represent to the world while seeking to discover new foundations. It felt like a good time to go back into history and look at what a great poet was thinking during a comparably turbulent time in Ancient Rome, before reorienting in the present and looking forward. 

The painting is in some way a Golden Bough in the sense that the process with it was a symbolic passing through an underworld for me as the painter engaged in a pursuit. On a technical level the painting was painted “in reverse”, from light to dark. The black paint of the background was painted after the branches, and in my opinion the blackness is it’s own presence in the painting, rather than just negative or empty space. 

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Underworld

(Palette of The Golden Bough)

16″ x 19″

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I painted the Golden Bough on a wall in the kitchen of my apartment. Conducted during a time when I had no studio, I painted at night. Here are a few images of from the process:

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Before beginning the painting, I drew the whole image on a black gessoed canvas with colored pencils. I was working from a photograph I had taken many years prior to beginning this work. I gridded out the canvas and the original photo and worked square by square:

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The first thing I painted was the lamp. I thought, if I can’t paint the lamp then there’s no use in going on, so I started with the lights:

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