When You Strip It All Away”

18” x 24” Complex Mixed Media
By Michael Sean Degnan

At first glance, this painting makes you smile. A figure in a blue suit and fedora stands confidently before a shimmering field of bronze and gold. The face is a skull—playful, almost welcoming—its eyes reflecting gold leaf that catches and transforms with every shift of light. But beneath the whimsy lies a question that is impossible to ignore.

Who are we… when everything we use to define ourselves is gone?

This 18” × 24” complex mixed media work is built with intentionally sculpted texture, layered with variegated bronze and gold leaf, color-changing pigments, and reflective surfaces that ensure no two viewings are ever the same. As you move, the painting changes. It refuses to remain static, much like identity itself.

The figure wears the universal symbols we use to make assumptions—a suit, a tie, a hat. These are the visual cues we instinctively use to place people into categories before we’ve spoken a single word. Yet the face beneath them is a skull.

The great equalizer.

The painting quietly reminds us that beneath politics, wealth, race, religion, profession, status, success, failure, and every label we invent, we share the same architecture.

I have been many things in my life. Artist. Teacher. Curator. Judge. Dreamer. Success. Failure. Hero in someone’s story. Villain in another. Those identities change depending on who’s looking.

But beneath all of them…

We’re remarkably alike.

I rarely create paintings that are overtly political. I prefer asking questions rather than giving answers. Yet I suspect that years from now, when someone encounters this painting in a museum—wink… nod…—and notices it was created in 2026, they’ll understand there was another conversation taking place beneath the paint.

Perhaps they’ll remember a time when people became experts at dividing themselves by everything except their shared humanity.

And perhaps they’ll smile at the irony that the skull, often seen as a symbol of death, becomes here a symbol of equality.

Strip away every label…

And what remains is all of us.
Respectfully offered $8900

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