God’s Dinner Table (title suggested by Denise Huntington)

For better or worse, here is the final version of a drawing I’ve been working on for more than three weeks. It is based on an illustration accompanying an acrostic poem, “Spectral Sanctums,” I wrote late last year. (Interested? Here is a link: https://onewithclay.wordpress.com/2014/12/30/spectral-sanctums/ )The illustration was of a smaller scale, 8-1/2″ x 5-1/2″, and had no cutlery nor stoneware on the placemat. This one’s 22″ x 30″, the largest-scale drawing I’ve made since the 80s. Here’s a photo Denise took this morning of me holding the drawing:

My working title for this drawing was “Homage to Bruegel.” Pieter Breugel the Elder had painted landscapes and peasantry and then let you know what was REALLY going on via the title; thus “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” has the requisite elements of ploughman, shepherd and fisherman vying for attention while poor doomed Icarus’s legs are all that can be seen as Icarus plunges into the sea. Analogously, I have a fork in much smaller scale off the placemat and seemingly on a different trajectory than the place setting. It is meant to compound the “what’s wrong with this picture?” incongruity of a dinner setting against the Cosmos.

But Denise instantly upon seeing the drawing came up with a title that I like much better, so “God’s Dinner Table” it remains.