"Still Anchored"

I finished this painting yesterday. I worked from a photograph I took about a year ago in St Louis Cemetery, New Orleans. It had been a warm day, with one of those parti-colored skies, dynamic and splotchy with swatches of blue, white and slate shifting and overlapping above.

I don’t think the disrepair of St Louis Cemetery had anything to do with Katrina. The tombs and monuments had simply been ignored into decrepitude. Thorns overgrew the plots. Majestic marble statuary, soaring twenty feet into the air, had relinquished parts of itself to the ground below, where they lay growing lichen.

All the while I worked on this painting I thought of it as “The Headless Angel.” Only recently did I notice the absence of wings. One person who saw the work in progress seemed to find it shocking, blurting out, “Oh! She’s helpless! No head, one arm gone, the other one anchored to the ground!”

I have a different feeling about it. When I go beachcombing, I always seem to pick out the shells that have been rolling about in the surf for years, dead but still being transformed. This statue feels like that. What’s inside is showing, and it’s beautiful, with a battered dignity.
I call the painting “Still Anchored.”