These painting are called "40 Breaths”. They are egg tempera on true gesso . I started to learn egg tempera in 2019 and then, as for so many people, everything went completely haywire. I am just returning to it, really just beginning. Egg tempera has many qualities and associations I love. By its nature the process of painting with egg tempera slows me down.
For many years I have been interested in the idea of paintings as apotropaic objects (“supposedly having the power to avert evil and bad luck”). As a modern person my actual ability to think this way waxes and wanes, but seems to have some correspondence to the level of crisis and chaos in the ether. So that door is open again, not specifically for my own work of course , but as a way of looking at art which is outside of capital. I guess it’s called magical thinking.
I made these paintings as a memorial.
-Julia Zanes