"Our Southern Neighbors"

This composition and even its theme relates strongly to Giovanni Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert” or also known as the “Ecstasy of St Francis”. I’ve always loved it’s composition which, to me always seemed like it could be divided into four sections, with the figure in the lower right quadrant. My painting depicts Homero Gomez Gonzales a manager of a monarch butterfly reserve in Mexico, who was murdered early in 2020. I painted blue flow chart lines emanating from his stigmata and I had a feeling about the Bellini painting and decided to find it in a book or online and look at it. That’s when I read that the painting depicts St. Francis receiving the stigmata. Not sure if I knew that already, but it must have been in my brain somewhere and the image, I now realize holds well as a contemporary reboot of Bellini’s masterpiece...not that my painterly skill is any match, but just giving sway to his composition and depicting a contemporary figure who, like St Francis, connected with the natural world...and I hate to be too sappy in making a religious reference, but was martyred in turn. Christianity is not my thing, but it is a part of my psyche and personal history. I do not know why I placed a helicopter hovering above...in reading about Bellini’s version it says that “when Francis is receiving the sigmata, usually an angel, a seraph or a crucifix emitting rays is depicted as well.” but Bellini chose not to insert such a figure, rather it seems that there is just sunlight bathing St Francis and giving him his stigmata. My version substitutes flight technology for what I’m now accepting as an angel (from hell?) handing out his stigmata.