Jared Wants More...

I'm not sure really what to say about my turtle/hare painting yet. I keep on thinking of Joseph Beuys piece "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare." In this performance Beuys cover his head in honey and 50$ worth of gold leaf. He carried a dead hair in his arms and communicated with it while crossing over a some sort of fir tree limb. He believed himself to be a shaman of sorts. Many have postulated about the exact significance of this performance, and the metaphors within it. I think Joseph Beuys was a genius, and I think he was slightly crazy. He'd probably agree. He loved straddling the line of being silly and serious. The healing metaphor in this piece is very serious. The hare has been thought of as a metaphor for mankind, because the hare in ancient myths have a connection to the sky and the universe.

The reason why I do not think that it is useful to connect them - although Beuys always refered to Steiner's ideas, - is Beuys drawing "Partitur fuer Dieter Koepplin": The process how an idea comes to form is shown from left to right.
Steiner described this process from top to bottom. He used Newton's physics - words like gravity - to explain it. But with Albert Einstein gravity became obsolete and replaced by inertia. This forced Steiner to call Einstein an idiot in one of his lectures... I think it was April 26th 1926, but this is more than shaky.

So the hare that is dead may actually be man who has committed suicide. However, the hare is held in the arms of a man (Joseph Beuys sitting on a chair) and both are surrounded by pictures. Beuys' head is covered with honey and gold leaf is put on it (a kind of golden mummy), and looks at the hare. He stands up and walks through the room, holds the hare close to the pictures, seems to communicate with it and sometimes interrupts his guided tour to cross a withered pine tree that lies in the gallery.

Not the drawing but it is a Beuys chalkboard which he kind of coined.

So I'm not sure. I suppose in a lot of ways the painting is more autobiographical than anything else. It seems rather vague naturally. Is the hare hurrying the turtle or is the turtle holding back the hare? Is either a bad/good thing? The painting often contextualizes itself while you paint it.
A couple others...
Durer
Another rabbit is below...
Click here to see Painting
This is a beautiful painting by a really good friend of mine, Andrew Johnson. His brother, who was HIV positive, overheard a few of his co-workers taking bets on how much longer he had to live. It is a part of his Pathetic Fallacies series, which has always had an enormous impact on me.