Two Allegories

I recently finished (or stopped working on) a pair of allegories that I've been working on for months.  They are meant to be a pair, even if they don't quite work together.

Here they are in my studio.  All of these photos are mine, and since I'm an amateur at this, the color relationships in both paintings are very distorted in these pictures.

 Apollo and Dionysos

Two figures who may or may not be the two gods appear with a musician together with women who play the role of audience, muses, and judges.  All of these figures could be real and visible to the musician, or they could be unreal and invisible to him.
I set them all in an over-grown ruin, a ruin created not by time but by warfare.

Apollo and Dionysos were never in conflict.  They are partners in a common enterprise.  If they are in conflict with anything then it is death and entropy, not each other.

 The other allegory; The Terrible Simplifiers (After Felix Nussbaum)

This painting was meant to be the companion of the Apollo and Dionysos painting and its antithesis.  It was inspired by Felix Nussbaum's last painting completed 2 days before his arrest and deportation to Auschwitz.  I reproduce that painting below.

Felix Nussbaum's Death Triumphant that inspired my painting.  I saw it last summer in the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, Germany




And here is a life drawing from a couple of days ago.  It's for a future painting in the Wojnarowicz series.