The Renaissance by Hiromi Lee

This was the first time I ever used an already existing piece as a reference, and it holds personal favor over a lot of my other paintings because it helped me get over my fear of rendering fabrics as well as the way light behaves in certain situations, things that I had always avoided. For the faces, I honestly replaced the original faces with cartoons because I didn’t want to copy another painting altogether, and also I wanted to somehow incorporate a part of my personality into it. As for the meaning or message of the painting as a whole, I didn’t have one in mind when I created it, but later, I decided that (maybe ironically) its meaningless nature was its meaning. The absurdity of existence is portrayed through divine, historically powerful figures having the faces of what essentially are jokes. According to Wikipedia, “the Absurd” refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life and the inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless, chaotic, and irrational universe.” The meaningless and irrationality of the universe that is so easy for us to forget in today’s structured society is represented by plastic, detached, uncaring faces, which are attached to emotional, dynamic human bodies, representing the human condition of searching for some feeling of purpose in our very human lives.