Acrylic on canvas

70 x 100 cm

Original Painting

Unframed

Sketches for an Altar Piece borrows the structure of an altarpiece and turns it into something contemporary, bodily and alive. Instead of offering a fixed religious image, it creates a charged space where desire, vulnerability, humour and reverence exist together. The figures feel tender, awkward, exposed and strangely luminous, as if they are taking part in a ritual whose meaning is still forming.

There is a wonderful tension here between sacred structure and human messiness. The orange outlines make the bodies pulse against the darkness, while floating  forms above them suggest fragments of memory, icons, theatre props, or offerings. The painting has the feeling of a private ceremony - half-remembered, half-invented -and the longer you look, the more it seems to reveal.

What makes the work compelling is that it does not settle into one reading. It is theatrical, erotic, devotional, comic and mysterious all at once. It feels like a sacred image that has been cracked open and allowed to become human again.

A bold original work on stretched canvas, sold unframed.