Communion, 2024

Pen and Ink on Strathmore 3-ply plate

9” x 11”

After Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath / The Great He-Goat (1798) a work created to mock the return to church-led medieval fears preceding the Ominous Decade (1823 -1833), in which superstitious fears of witches and devils were leveraged by the church for political and capital gain.

We find ourselves in a similar state of decay now with the rise of Christian Nationalism in the US. Weaponizing religion to justify stripping the American people of their rights is a thinly veiled form of authoritarianism. It is a dangerous practice that-as evidenced in Goya’s work-we have seen many times before in the western world.

In Communion, the devil is re-imagined as a peaceful teacher-figure for a human boy. He makes known the concept of self-love : an essential part of providing meaningful love to ‘thy neighbor’. After all, if we are not nurturing ourselves adequately, how can we nurture others?

Love needs a source from which to flow.