oil on panel
36" x 48"
2008.

Ascension is a painting which is compositionally rooted in the tradtional deposition of christ and pieta images in of the renaissance.  However, I wanted to take the story out of the confinds of christianity.  So I depicted a dead girl being carried up to the heavens by a swarm of butterflies.  Butterflies have symbolic significance in that they are born in one form(catterpiller) only to under go a remarkable transformation into another form (butterfly). It is with this in mind that we hold hopes that our lives will too continue in another form upon the inevitable confrontation of our own mortal deaths.