Documentary segment about Take Away the Stone

take away the stone is really the theme of Lazarus and I have done many paintings of Lazarus and drawings. I have a whole sketchbook of drawings trying to how do I feel about it because for me, when I would hear that story, it would be very

emotional to think of how tragic that these two sisters had lost their brother and the brother would have been the main person for them in that society. And then that jesus was such a close friend of his that he shuddered and he cried that at the

loss and and and I know in different funerals in our own family and how much confusion goes on when someone has died and what the family is going to do and how they handle it. I tried three different paintings, but the one painting that I always

liked was it was called Take Away the Stone because it had the feeling of a mexican muralist and it looked like the day of the dead. The other aspect is that the stone, that one looks at it in the larger picture that that we're all caught

in a tomb and then someone has to take the stone away so that we can become fully alive that there's so many things block us as we slowly get older and sometimes we we become more dead to the world and dead to our people around us.

And so this is a wonderful metaphor of take away the stones so we can become alive again Take away the stone has 57 colors printed and I based it on a water color and that water color was really shaped that they're almost like um gradations or

risk Euro in a way, but there's not a lot of use of black so that it isn't quite the tourist bureau, but I did want to create um, almost like a cubist shaping of each figure. Uh, the, but then I realized that it's really connected to

the, the artists that I liked. Some of the artists that I like the best are the Mexican muralists that also use that a lot in their murals. And also, um, it has a feeling of being in a, in a, in a latin country or in Mexico

for the day of the dead. You can see the figures leaving the town bringing their flowers, bringing candles and the musicians coming along here and as they come over here to the scene, they're the figures are moving the stone they've taken, they're taking the stone away.

Here are the family and all the people that are mourning the death of Lazarus. And there's christ or jesus, he's entered the tomb to embrace his friend and to bring him out of the tomb. And then here are all the young Children that are curious and

they're looking at the uh, at the figures here and they, I'm not sure if it's morning or, or I think it's morning rather than the evening, but it's quite different than the other work. But I was hoping I would get like a feeling of emotion and

and also very solid with all these figures.