The Virgin and (Parthenogenic) Child
September 2002
90 x 80 cms
Oil on canvas
The Virgin and (Parthenogenic) Child initially came from an art history class. I learned that, during the Renaissance, painters who wished to enter the painter's guild were given three commissions to carry out as tests. Obviously, these commissions were almost always religious or mythological themes, which accounts for the existence of so many paintings with those motifs at that time.
I decided to make my own version of some of these motifs and began with the painting of the Virgin and Child. I picked the theme while recalling another class, this one in high school, where a biology teacher explained the process of parthenogenesis, in which bees reproduce, making fully-fledged beings from a single gamete. The new knowledge spawned the heretical joke that Jesus was perhaps parthenogenic.
When choosing the aesthetic for the painting, I opted for exploring the opposite of what is normally done with the theme, and instead of illustrating the Virgin in a state of grace upon giving birth to the Savior, I studied ways to depict a poor and hunger-stricken person, from a miserable environment, terrorized by the responsibility of having to birth and raise the Savior.
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