In this painting, I set out to dialogue with Rogier Van der Weyden's "Deposition From the Cross", a reproduction of which I keep my studio. I started by turning it upside down, a trick painters use to gain some distance from what is depicted and see more clearly what a painting is, and how it works. The Christ figure in this position took on the feeling of a sleeper who dreams of other spaces and times. It reminded me of the mythological figure of Persephone, who dreams of returning to earth from the underworld, another cosmological story of death and rebirth.
Van der Weyden broke with the convention of his time, which dictated that this moment of the Christian story would have a landscape setting. Instead, he set his figures in a shallow, almost shadowbox-like space barely big enough to contain them, and orchestrated ingeniously layered rhythms and repetitions that loop and sweep back and forth between the inward-curving figures that bracket the painting's left and right edges. The ten nearly full-size figures have a startlingly sculptural quality as they thrust out towards the viewer, but at the same time their crisp contours and the linear aspects of the angular folds of their garments seem to attach to and sit on the picture plane, emphasizing the painting's qualities of abstraction. The way the figures completely fill the painting, both its fictive space and its picture plane - from extreme edge to extreme edge, and bottom to top, is another aspect of the painting that I find remarkable for its time, and that I tried to riff on myself. I've often wondered if Max Beckmann admired this painting.