Running to Stand Still

Hello, and welcome to the fourth and final blog supporting the Working Title exhibit, on view at Da Vinci Art Alliance through September 21. Four paintings — each drawn from four oil masterpieces in four European museums — are now reimagined in egg tempera. Still Life with Jimmy Dean closes the loop, teleporting a Dutch Golden Age motif into 1970s Texan suburbia. It carries the same temporal skips that run through the whole project: from Renaissance banquet to breakfast-room table under incandescent light. It’s abundance and memento mori rerouted into a decade of synthetic expedience.

STILL LIFE WITH JIMMY DEAN. 2025. Egg tempera on panel. 18 × 24 inches.

The source is Floris van Schooten’s Still Life with Ham, painted in 1626. His table is stripped down but precise — ham, cheese, bread, a pewter tankard, all staged on a white cloth with geometric restraint. It’s a modest feast, but it still carries the old Dutch still-life tension: nourishment balanced against decay, abundance shadowed by its end.

Still Life with Jimmy Dean became something more personal for me — a kind of memento mori two years after the death of my mother. The spread is no longer a banquet but the breakfast of a latchkey kid: a turning banana, sausage patties, a Texas Honey Bun still sealed in its cellophane, ready to be grabbed running out the door. Tang — the drink of Houston astronauts — waits in its canister, with a toy lunar lander buried somewhere in the powder. Robust, earthy bread has been traded for shelf-stable pastries; artisanal plenty replaced by packaged expedience.

Floris van Schooten, Still Life with Ham, 1626. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Where a Dutch still life was a slow meditation on transience, mine morphs into urgency — the clock ticking, the scramble to get to the bus. Van Schooten’s depth of black is still there, but it’s now interrupted by the bright flat pop of Fred Flintstone grinning from a box of Fruity Pebbles, tossing technicolor sugar as if it were fruit.

The vanitas survives, but its reminders have shifted: not fruit and meat spoiling in plain sight, but processed food shot through with preservatives. Instead, it’s the erosion of culture and sense of time — the experience of time itself flattened by expedience, urgency, and convenience.

TIGER’S BLOOD. 2025. egg tempera on panel. 11 × 14 inches.

In closing out this fourth painting, the whole project comes into clearer view for me. Working Title was never just about raiding the Old Masters or dressing them in shag carpet and polyester. I think it was about searching for a parity of descriptors within the parody — finding balance between reverence and send-up. It’s been about what happens when history collides with memory, when museum grandeur runs headlong into the small urgencies of growing up in 1970s Texas. A synthesis of the high and the low. The Dutch feast becomes a kid’s rushed breakfast, the mythic footrace stalls out on wall-to-wall carpet, a Roman god of wine slouches next to a Jell-O mold.

PORTRAIT MODE. 2025. egg tempera on panel. 12 × 16 inches.

Across the four panels, what holds them together isn’t just egg tempera or their source material, but a shared condition: abundance shadowed by its end, aspiration undercut by interruption. They are memory-tableaux, yes, but also psychological mash-ups — portraits of how culture is inherited, misremembered, recycled, and warped by time.

ATALANTA, INTERRUPTED. 2025. Egg tempera on panel. 24 × 36 inches.

That’s why the exhibit name is provisional. Each painting remains a working title: unsettled, unresolved, incomplete. Yet they’re finished in another sense — not as fixed monuments, but as openings. What began as a private chase through European museums now exists as a public invitation. The hope is that someone else’s memory, someone else’s suburban morning or mythic daydream, finds a place to land inside these rooms.

Working Title runs Sept 4–21 at Da Vinci Art Alliance, part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Closing reception September 21, 12–2 pm.

Preorder prints are available now — hand-signed, limited edition, numbered. See it on the wall in my show or on the wall in your home.

See you at POST - Philadelphia Open Studio Tours - in October.