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“Fire and Blood”, 2019.
No matter how Game of Thrones ends, it’s changed my life for the better. I have fallen in love with and been inspired by so many of these characters, and their stories will be burning in me forever.

I’m genuinely upset that the show is coming to its end in just six weeks. I normally do long and obnoxious Game of Thrones posts all over social media, but this year I’ve avoided posting and even rewatching because I’m kind of in denial; I don’t want it to end.

Amid the stress of renovations and an upcoming move, I have squeezed in time to breathe new life into an old painting I had done of Daenerys Stormborn. I am feeling satisfied and sad to be done with her. I hope I’ve done her justice.

Daenerys, may I carry your fierceness and fire into every challenge before me
Valar Morgulis

A visual interpretation of Lacy Rose’s album, “Ria”, itself a meditation on three paintings of Gustav Klimt of Ria Munk. Ria was unlucky in love – her fiancé, a ne-er do well poet twice her age, broke off their engagement and poor heartbroken Ria took her own life, shooting herself in the chest.

Listen to Ria in its entirety here:

Her mother hired Gustav Klimt to paint her daughter’s posthumous portrait. The first portrait portrayed Ria as “too dead,” complained her mother. The second was too sensuous, as it depicted Ria’s robe hanging open, revealing her breasts. And, perhaps fittingly, Gustav Klimt died before he could finish the third. Ria’s smiling face is painted looking at the viewer, and flowers creep into her frame from the background, but her robe and body are left unfinished, Klimt’s charcoal sketch lines the final remnant of Ria’s body.

I’ve tried to paint Ria’s anguish, and by leaving a few charcoal lines visible, suggest the wistful kind of eternity that only unfinished business can bring.