St. Francis.

St. Francis. (Based on Giotto, 'St. Francis preaching to the birds') Oil on gold leaf. One day years ago, Natalie and I were walking home from an art show and we stumbled on this small piece of wood lying on the ground. It had great texture and I knew one day I could use it. Months ago, after preparing this panel, I applied gold leaf with cheap vodka. I was going to paint another floral work but since I feel the urge to chase my desire to paint religious works, I told myself, why not start now?

I hope you enjoy the result. (This piece is for sale. If you are interested please contact me. info@martinrebello.com)

St. Francis. I custom made this frame for the piece. I painted the edge with gold and burnt out holes to match his halo design.

St. Francis' head. I wanted him to have a wise and powerful look. The Holy Spirit is truly acting through him and St. Francis is really preaching to the birds. He sees no one else at this moment, mid way in his sermon. In the original piece his tonsure is a darker hair colour than his beard but I wanted them to match. I will have to conduct more research on this point though. Perhaps they wore a type of wig or hat in those days.

St. Francis' halo. As you can see I looked into the history of halos quite a bit. Traditionally halos were represented flat on the canvas vs. the floating halo that came about with perspective. I decided to use a flat halo. If you look through religious works you will see that Jesus is most always represented with a halo containing a cross. One example that illustrates all these points well is Fra Angelico's, 'Flight into Egypt' painting.

St. Francis' halo is kept very traditional. The lines/rays around his head are a motif you find in many old master works. I put a wide, deep line with 3 thinner lines in between all around his head. If you notice the thicker lines hit the outer holes, leaving 3 holes between each 2 deep lines. These 3 holes are meant to represent the Trinity and the 5 wounds of Christ. (Hands, Side and Feet) The thinner lines coming from each of these symbolic holes, represent the stigmata wounds that St. Francis carried. The wounds of Christ.

St. Francis' cincture. I painted this cincture with 3 knots. Again this is to represent the Holy Trinity and the wounds of Christ. (You can see some different studies I made of the cincture on the white sheet of paper above - bottom left)

St. Francis' hands. How could I ever do justice to such Holy hands? These 2 hands took weeks to complete and together they take up less space than 1 tonnie! I wanted to stay true to Caravaggio and so I painted his nails to appear dirty. (Caravaggio always painted his figures with dirty nails) At first I had painted the stigmata wounds very red but after looking up many other examples and staring at it for hours, I decided sticking with the palette of this work would be best. (The entire painting (minus the gold) is painted with 3 colours: Burnt Sienna, Zinc White and Blue)