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Natural Causes

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Natural Causes (Lamp)

Project medium
Oil on linen

Dimensions
20" x 16"

My friend Brian Brodeur’s latest poetry collection helped rouse up this ongoing series, focused on excavated, stretched and examined bodies. Each canvas becomes scarred or cracked by the process of becoming a picture in a way that reminds me how we earn scars and wrinkles by growing into ourselves. By painting all body parts on canvas the same size as in life, I let the image be determined more by the actual bodies of the people I work with than any single point of view. The process lets me discover how to stack the elbows, knuckles, shins and chins in unfamiliar ways. I’m less interested in perpetuating the illusion that these are complete, sufficient portraits than in exploring how likenesses themselves are fragile.

Paul X. Rutz

Works by Paul X. Rutz

Natural Causes

Natural Causes (Lamp)