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Love Murder Mountain. This painting was meant to be part of a greater project in which I was going to do my version of The Garden Of Earthly Delights. Heaven, earth and hell all represented by a different mountain. This was to be earth. The painting was largely inspired by Jordorowsky's film Holy Mountain. I did the painting before I actually saw the film, basing my ideas and inspirations from friends' descriptions. "Duuuude, you never saw Holy Mountain? Oh my God, that movie is a total mind fuck! You'll looove it...!" Someone once asked me why there were no limbs on many of the figures in my paintings. I gave a somewhat formulated answer being that this was a question that I was most often asked. But upon thinking about it, I decided the real root of my obsession was from an event that happened when I was five. I was sleeping over at my friends Charles and Andres' house because my parents went out for the evening. When I woke up in the morning I walked in to their parents bedroom while they were sleeping. Their sleeping father, who had had two arms the night before, now only had one. In its place was now only a stump, just below the shoulder. I couldn't wrap my head around it. I circled the bed quietly looking for the arm. Was it pinned under him? My mind couldn't comprehend the situation. How could he be sleeping so soundly when at some point during the night his arm had been removed? I could barely wait til he woke up. It was explained to me very delicately at their kitchen table where his prosthetic arm was lying. He told me in the simplest terms how he had lost it in the Vietnam war and then showed me how he put it on. I begged him to do it again, and kept begging until he became irritated. It wasn't so much the morbid fascination that intrigued me, it was that sense of not being able to believe what I was seeing. This was that beautiful feeling of when reality is taken out of your hands. When everything you thought is, isn't. That feeling of being let in on a secret. |