Painting: Skull Series #11
Written By David Harris
Torild Stray
Skull Series #11
oil on linen
2015
30 x 30 cm
Each day in my studio, at the Norsk Stålpress/ Steel factory—morning and night—I was greeted by the skull I had made from the cast of a real one. My friend Jeremiah in New York always said, “Everybody loves skulls,” and he wasn’t wrong. Their form holds a mystery artists can’t resist. So I began to paint it: the skull as muse, model, and storyteller. The series stayed within a limited size, but shifted constantly in light, mood, and presence. The longer I worked with it, the stranger the visions that emerged.
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