Art history is my painter’s roadmap to life. It is full of brilliantly diligent and often flawed humans. Their now esteemed artworks serving as evidence of how they comprehended their environment and negotiated a path amid their contemporaries. The artistic movements they mastered show us how they celebrated humanity as Diego Velazquez did with his portraits of Spanish court jesters (Francisco Lezcano, c. 1645). Or, like Kathe Kollwitz, resisted oppression with widely circulated prints (The Mothers from War, c. 1923). I sometimes wonder about Caravaggio painting that epic chiaroscuro masterpiece The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1608) while on the run from the law in southern Italy. Or Rosa Bonheur in mid nineteenth century Paris, incognito in gentlemen’s attire in order to sketch in public as she prepared for her massive naturalist painting The Horse Fair (1853). Presented here are homages to past master painters or works inspired by them.
