Expulsion After Charles Copeland (2024)


 My social media feeds (by which I mean Facebook, and the NYT's comments sections) are full of apocalyptic invective these days. Lots of it feels very Old Testament, so in that spirit here's the latest version of a piece I've been working on for many years: Expulsion After Charles Copeland.

"Expulsion" paintings were a genre of European "high" art that delivered sobering biblical lessons (here's Adam and Eve being driven out of paradise!) while also giving the viewers some church sanctioned nudity.
I've always enjoyed blatant hypocrisy in art (and in life), so I've made various drawings and paintings based on Expulsion paintings ever since art school. About twenty years ago I came across an old "men's magazine" illustration from the 60's that looked for all the world like one of these paintings -- except even sleazier! -- by a great American illustrator named Charles Copeland, and I made a digital painting based on it using CGI and Photoshop.

This latest reworking used new digital tools in Photoshop to lend it more of a painterly "patina."