Face3

The next in my Ambrosium series, this painting really started to focus what my ideas were about. When I started painting these, I really wasn't clear on what exactly I was trying to express. People always think that creativity comes in the flash of brilliant insight and you know just what you want to do. But I have found that it most frequently comes from fumbling blindly forward into the unknown, and then clarifying what you have done. With this clarity comes the responsibility of furthering your ideas, pushing them to the limit of experiment.

These Ambrosium paintings are about a submission to ecstasy. They are largely inspired by traditional baroque and renaissance religious paintings. The eyes are rolled back in her head, fixed on the heavens, yet this honey, this cosmic goo, is threatening to cover her, possibly even suffocate her. Thus there arises a tension between the fact that she is obviously raptly focused on something so wonderful that the pain that she is also feeling cannot compare to the pleasure.

These experiences are similar to those that Saint Theresa recounts in her memoirs about the pleasure that she felt when in ecstasy with god--it was so pleasurable that it was painful, yet she would never want the experience to end. There is also a blatantly sensual side to these paintings, which I purposely tried to maximize because of the sexual language that many saints use when discussing their ecstasy.