Suffering of St. Sebastian

This will be a post about the unexpected surprises that I encountered as I created this illustration.

While I was working on a commission, I decided that I needed to multi-task and do other art as the oil dries. Plus I am still attempting to practice and master the art of drawing. As per my usual practice, I hit up Instagram and Google hard. At the time, "gruesome" artwork that was made to be beautiful was interesting to me. This is because I felt that making something gruesome beautiful is a huge challenge because you need to evoke to simultaneous feelings in the viewer - disgust and fascination. This is how my search led me to Takato Yamamoto.

I started perusing his work (https://www.wikiart.org/en/takato-yamamoto) and all the pieces looked "cool." He had this very modern pop art style reminiscent of Mucha. However, instead of drawing advertisements of beautiful women, he drew beautiful people surrounded by death. Then this piece "St. Sebastian" literally made me stop and go, "wowwwwwwwww..."

This feeling of mine was that same feeling that you get when appreciating art wherein you see an amazing film, listen to an empowering song, read an impactful book, or in this case see a piece of art that captures your fascination. It is the feeling that generates the thought, "I must have this," or in this case, "I must recreate this." I have had this same feeling with Frank Frazetta and Mucha, but now I found it in a modern and living Japanese artist, Takato Yamamoto. This was the first unexpected surprise.

As I began recreating this piece, it became more and more intricate. More and more time-consuming. In the end, it was a 30+ hr piece, reminiscent of my larger 4x5 foot paintings. However, with each section completed, I was driven to continue onward, and this was in spite of the fact that my son was born on November 20th (a separate blog post will be written on how to persevere when surviving with a newborn).

When the ink was done, I needed to decide whether to keep it black and white as I have done with other pieces or whether to color it. It became very obvious that part of the emotional power behind Takato's piece is the gloom instilled by his color scheme. Although, I had been experimenting with marker, this felt like this piece would be ripe for water color. I haven't done water color in over a decade, but still had the materials. So I first did a quick tutorial on water color painting found my materials, and then dove head first in. No worries about mistakes as learning comes from doing.

In the end, the water color turned out fantastic. This was the second unexpected surprise. Water color as a medium has this great propensity of creating randomness when varying the amount of water used. The primary color scheme is black, gray, raw umber, yellow ochre, skin-tone. The green, red, and other color highlights add some highlights. The thing that really made it pop is the contrast of the bright crimson red blood against the black and gloom of the rest of the illustration.

The blood was one of my favorite things in this illustration. Another was the random skull attached to the maiden's head. As my brother and I both have a similar creed, "Memento Mori," I thought it was highly appropriate to have him include a skull in this St. Sebastian piece. The last was the realization that the tree on the left is a symbolic representation of what I would call the watchers of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. If you only quickly glance at it, it looks like a tree.

The final unexpected surprise was the fact that I was recreating an illustration of St. Sebastian. I stumbled across the piece on a website who simply titled Takato's piece "Suffering," and the exposition treated the man pierced with arrows as a random individual dying (although the halo should have given something away). However, it was my mother who pointed out that this was St. Sebastian, who also turns out to be a pretty famous saint. The reason this was an unexpected surprise was because I love painting Christian mythology centered around Jesus. This was my first Christian painting of a saint. And as one who will have read until this point, I am not a devout Christian by any means, so the fact that this topic continues to fascinate may need to be explored in another blog post.

To conclude, this illustration yielded new techniques, a new artist to study, and a new theme to explore. Overall, I am very pleased with the recreation of it and will let the readers do a comparison through navigation to Takato Yamamoto's website as art is not just about appreciation but about sharing in each other's delights.