THE QUESTION:
a series of paintings & drawings
by Warren Criswell

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I didn't intend for this to be a series. It was just that one image spawned another, which spawned another, etc., in an image-breeding frenzy that went on for several years before I was able to break out of it. It was apparently a conflation of several sources. I know I had been reading Sartre's "The Question" in Being and Nothingness and Dostoyevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor," a chapter in The Brothers Karamazov, and I had surely been looking at El Greco's portrait of Cardinal Inquisitor Niño de Guevara. But I interpreted all this in terms of the döppelganger: a kind of Jeckel-and-Hyde, superego-id pair played by me as both the Grand Inquisitor and his prisoner. All this is exhaustively elaborated upon in my 1995 essay "The Egg & the I."

Warren Criswell, 2013 

 


The Question, 1991, oil on linen, 36 x 48 inches

 

" In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his 'cultural lendings' and stand naked in the storm of life."

.............................................Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

 


The Storm, 1992, oil on linen,
48 x 36 inches
 

The Cardinal Reading, 1992, acrylic &
conté crayon on bargasse paper,
22 x 30 inches

 


  
The Kiss, 1992, oil on linen,
48 x 36 inches

 


  
Table Dancer, 1992, acrylic & oil on
paper, 28 x 23 inches

 




Two Manikins, 1992, mixed media
on paper, 25 x 32 inches



  
The Diver, 1993, oil on panel,
59 x 44 inches
 
The Temptation, 1991, charcoal, pastel & spray enamel on gessoed sheet, 41 x 31 inches

 

The Trespasser, 1993, oil on linen, 60 x 48 inches

The Cardinal on the Grate, 1993, oil
on acylic on paper, 36 x 31 inches
 
  
Study for "Highway 61", 1993, acrylic & conté on paper,
34 x 26 inches
  
Highway 61, 1993, oil on panel,
48 x 36 inches

 


 
Changing Woman, 1992, oil on linen, 48 x 36 inches

 


 
The Animation, 1992, acrylic &
conte on paper, 34 x 30 inches 

 




The Judgment, 1993, oil on wood, 44 x 49 inches



The Cardinal at Circe's, 1995, oil on
wood veneer,
8 x 7 inches

 
Hunter's Moon, 1994, oil on linen,
44 x 60 inches


 

  
All the King's Horses, 1992, oil on linen,
48 x 36 inches


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