The bodies emerging from the whiteness is fascinating – their muscles and skin are intact, somehow, like the whiteness is not sticky, like it bubbles them out in pieces, whole. I’ve always had a phobia of things unfolding from other things unnaturally, in discrete bits. There was this pool once, an above-ground pool in a friend’s backyard, one of those blue vinyl things with a plastic frame. She had just put in grass and the grass sprouted through the blue vinyl bottom and did so in a way that the holes were air-tight, conformed to the stalks of grass, so the water level stayed staunch. But it was unnerving – the grass poking through, slicing my feet with their otherness. This is how I understand the resurrection of the flesh – unnatural, disconcerting, the ground bearing skin out of its chalky depths, unexplainable.

 

One thing that draws my eye is the pattern of little dots in the yellow sky – they pop so much, yet I have no idea of their significance. It seems almost like they’re trying to give perspective, becoming more distant and spaced out farther down the painting as the foreground nears, then becoming infinitesimal at the top arch. The perspective here is already confused, though – the angels are huge, much larger than the people, and even if angels are supposed to be large, they’re standing on rocks, which are almost floating above the people’s heads. The whiteness from which the flesh is resurrected becomes a cloud of indeterminacy, bridging the humans and the angels. It seems otherworldly, and I suppose it is, this fantasy. I just suppose I wouldn’t want my flesh resurrected, I wouldn’t want my flesh to need to be resurrected, if solely for the purpose of maintaining my distance from this dizzying world where size and perspective are blurred, where things protrude from places that have no business delivering them.