The Expulsion

This painting surfaced while I was experimenting with archaic pigments, including Cremintz (lead) white, ochers and vermillion.

This doesn’t happen often. As soon as I painted this image, the figure on the right began to bother me. I knew that the open-mouthed face had come from somewhere. I found it, to my surprise, in a library book on Renaissance art. I saw it, some 40 years ago, in Florence on one of my backpacking trips.

Here is a detail from “Expulsion from the Garden of Eden,” 1424 -27, an early Renaissance fresco by Masaccio and others.