48x24 inches, oil on canvas. Framed, wired and ready to hang.

About:

This was one of the first paintings where I mixed acrylic and oil paints. I started with a very watery messy abstract pass over the whole canvas in acrylic, not really knowing what I was making, but having a whole lot of fun doing it. After establishing a nice texture I decided to switch to oils to take advantage of their look and feel.

When I was in Arkansas one day I was out for a walk along the river that ran past my dads shop. It was late in the year and nestled up in a bed of rusty brown leaves I found a nearly perfect deer skull and some other random bones laying around it. It had been there awhile and was clean and bleached white from the sun. I took it with me and it was now sitting on a shelf in my studio. 

The subject in this painting appeared pretty late into the painting. In the messy abstract shapes I could kind of make out a deer skull and so I decided that I’d push it in that direction. Using the Arkansas skull as reference I decided to recreate the scene where I found the skull.