My mom died from breast cancer ten years ago. My brother, Greg, my future sister-in-law, Cecilia, and I were in her hospital room when she passed away. It was devastating, naturally, as her passing was quite sudden. Greg and I were both by my mom’s side, each holding a hand, when she took her last breath. I believe she died in peace, knowing that her two boys, now grown, were by her side and doing well.

 

   She particularly loved Yellowtail Chardonnay wine. Her life was poured out that day to the last drop. But it doesn’t go down the drain. Instead, through death, one gives life to others. ​In the Christian tradition, the Descent from the Cross typically depicts Jesus being carefully lowered from the cross by mourners. The Virgin Mary, John, Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus take down his body, prepare it for burial, and place it in the tomb. Jesus, too, pours out everything once dead. I imagine that Jesus’s friends and family by his side felt the same as I did when my mom passed with her hand in mine. Jesus pours out everything when pierced with the lance on the cross, but through his gift, he has given life to all of us, just as my mom has given her life joyfully for her family, for me. Even in our darkest hour, when a loved one dies, there is hope on the horizon.

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   The Descent from the Cross relates to Be Still Media's prompt, "art has to come from the human experience," because this piece emerges from this very real human experience we all will encounter: grief. Yet, how do we interpret our grief? How do we deal with it when weeks pass by and the flowers from the funeral get thrown out? How do we understand it when we still can't believe that they are gone? We can express our grief and anger by painting a panel black or throwing paint violently at a canvas, and these help us express it, but not necessarily comprehend it. Art's role is to help us embody our experience and give it meaning. 

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   This piece was part of a solo show I did as a graduate student of philosophy at Saint Louis University. The aim of this project was to depict religious art using non-religious objects through still life compositions, mimicking what some of the Dutch Golden Age artists did with their "vanitas" still life paintings that embodied a Christian imperative of memento mori (remember that you have to die). I found in this process my own life experience coming to the fore in the midst of these secular-yet-religious compositions. My own grief of losing my mother can be embodied in an empty bottle with some overflowing wine glasses accompanying it.

 

   Without this experience of loss, this image loses its power. Artificial Intelligence (AI) could make the same thing in a second, but without this context, it would just remain as a random assortment of still-life objects with no meaning. At this point, dare I say, it might fail to be art. Art that comes from the human experience has what André Breton calls "convulsive beauty." It is through the clash of ordinary life with our human psychology that transfigures it before us: A bottle opener becomes a cross, a bottle becomes a mother, wine becomes Life itself.