Monday, September 12, 2011

Description of the painting The Tragedy of Man

This is a painting called The Tragedy of Man by Peter Reynosa. It is a portrait of Barack Obama as a slave in agony. It is an acrylic on canvas. It is 24x30. I decided to do a work of art about President Barack Obama. I decided to portray him as a slave not to degrade or demean him but to point out the fact that had he been born in America sometime in the past he could have been born a slave. The horror of this painting is not that someone painted Barack Obama as a slave, but that if Barack Obama had been born 150 years ago in America he could have been born a slave. And I did the painting in black and white to suggest how a black man was once completely trapped in a white world if he was born in America. And I purposefully used his body image but tried to make the head look  like a humanoid creature and not exactly like his head. This is to stress the fact how slavery left a person barely recognizable as a human being. And the shape of the head I got  from Edvard Munch's The Scream, at least the top part of the head.

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