Seminary Tower,
Alexandria, VA
Robert Winter, 2004 

Acrylic on Stretched Canvas
24" x 18"

Giclee Print:   $400
On Sheet Canvas, Unframed

Framed Original:   Not currently for sale

Artist's Notes

There's something strikingly pristine about this church tower. 

There's also some of the unearthliness of a NASA rocket in the way it thrusts upward into the blue.

Yet when you look a little closer, it's brimming with the most elemental of life forces.

In the Freudian view, all steeples may be phallic, but this one is especially so. There's probably no need to go into too great detail on what besides the tower itself might be suggestive of bodily features, but it's worth noting that when you look at this image long enough, even the dazzling white color turns out to have an pearlescent quality that renders it...well...appropriate for a seminary, whose ultimate purpose is to inseminate the world with ideas and beliefs.

In depicting all of this, my intent was not in any way to be disrespectful.  Actually, as I was painting it, I was thinking about  the English poet John Donne, who in his later years, often used sexual imagery to describe religious experience (after having spent a lot of his younger years using religious imagery to describe sex).

In the Donne context, it seems appropriate that the tower's left side almost literally dissolves into the sky--that there's no physical boundary between the two, and the tower becomes one with what it thrusts into.

I also think it's fitting that at the summit, the symbol of the cross shoots into the heavens the way it does.  I wanted to infuse the ascent to a higher realm with an orgasmic intensity.  (Personally, I find that a lot more compelling than, say, traditional pop culture images of pearly gates and people sitting around on clouds playing harps.)

Elsewhere in the scene, the shapes of the three crosses in the windows of the brick building were serendipitous, but I emphasized them when I realized they might represent some sort of allusion to Calvary.  (I like the way earlier painters did that sort of thing, and I figured I might as well carry a little of it forward.)

It's also not accidental that in this scene, everything reaches heavenward--the tree and the ivy as well as the spire.  To me, this is a kind of upward yearning that's inherent in the most basic of life forces. 

I consider this sort of muscular striving toward the transcendent perfectly fitting for man--a creature once memorably described as having "his feet in the muck and his head in the stars."

 

© COPYRIGHT 2004 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.