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A7. The School of Northside

The School of Northside


The School Of Northside is a concept for a proposed mural that will never be painted on the East side wall of the Chas. A. Miller & Sons Funeral Home in the community of Northside here in Cincinnati, Ohio (sadly, the two trees that are now in front of the structure would need to be sacrificed in order to create an unobstructed view; an unlikely scenario in the age of GREEN). The imagery is loosely based on several works of art. The first among these is Rembrandt's The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem Van Ruytenburch aka Night Watch. A second source was Raphael Sanzio's The School of Athens. Along with these two well-known paintings I drew heavily on the styles of artists that shall remain nameless since it doesn't really matter a great deal to anyone who they are. Thematically, the drawing continues what was begun with the illustration I did for the cover of last year's The Tempers Perform The Best Of Maurice Mattei Vol. 3 CD. Both works are comprised (composed?) of 13 figures, one figure of which dominates the canvas. In the first work the focus was on the large she-wolf. In the drawing above the apex of attention is the robust bearded gentleman in the center of the composition. He is the de-facto Christhead; the twelve remaining figures becoming his distracted, disheveled apostles. As an aside, the she-wolf of the first drawing was the Christ, thereby uniting both the Christian and Pagan traditions of Western Culture's glorious past. Northside is a wonderful community filled with colorful, artistic people and I have attempted to render these aspiring Mensheviks and Womensheviks in a manner commensurate with their astounding lifestyles. No one portrayed here is meant to be any one specific individual. Rather, they are composites of many different people; the musician, the fry cook, the vegan, the failed writer, the young single mother with her precocious daughter, the struggling small business owner, the unrepentant car thief and his record-collecting sidekick.

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