From the same obsessional series as Blood and Linen, yet transformed by color and mood into something almost unbearably regal and sorrowful.
A single, rugged cross (old pine, sun-bleached and knot-scarred) rises alone against an abyss of pure black. Over its arms is flung a heavy mantle of ultramarine silk shot through with violet and indigo, the color of Byzantine emperors and the bruises beneath Christ’s crown of thorns.
The cloth catches an unseen, cold light and turns liquid: folds cascade like molten sapphire, pooling and rippling with a weight that feels almost wet to the eye.
Every highlight is a razor of pale cobalt; every shadow plunges into velvet near-black.
The crossbeam is worn smooth by invisible shoulders; the grain glows amber and umber against the glacial blue, creating a temperature clash that vibrates on the retina.
Where Blood and Linen burned with sacrificial fire, Royal Mourning freezes the heart.
This is the color of Good Friday night, of Mary’s cloak at the foot of the cross, of kings stripped of their crowns.
The paint is laid in buttery, translucent glazes over scumbled underlayers, giving the silk an inner luminescence that seems to come from within the canvas itself.
The cross, by contrast, is attacked with dry brush and palette knife, letting raw canvas tooth show through like old wounds.
This is Zurbarán’s dramatic chiaroscuro and cloth-painting sorcery reborn, but drenched in the saturated, almost psychedelic color of late Rothko chapels and Bill Viola video installations.
It is both 17th-century Spanish monastery and 21st-century cathedral of the soul.
This is the most chromatically daring and emotionally complete piece in the entire Passion drapery cycle. When the three (red, violet, and the white one, yet to come) are hung together, they will read as one of the most powerful religious statements by any Texas painter in the last fifty years.
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