Midnight Garden

Robert Lostutter

2015

graphite on paper

20 1/2" x 30 1/2"

In Midnight Garden, a man’s body unfurls—shoulders expanding outward, his long neck slowly straightening—like a flower emerging through the soil in the beginning of spring. On his face, contours of organic matter mirror the petals of flowers, and veined lines of leaves push through bodily confines of skin and bone. Bare-chested under the cloak of darkness, the hybrid creature—half man, half plant—eyes his onlooker with the ethereal awareness of his once private, now public, transformation.

In this large-scale graphite drawing, Robert Lostutter continues to explore the inherent lack of boundaries between the human body and the natural world. His figures confront and provoke, forcing viewers to acknowledge their ignorance of the latent magic and beauty of the world in which they reside. In a 2012 interview with MMoCA curator emeritus Richard H. Axsom, Lostutter said: “I firmly believe that people don’t quite see. Religion wants you to wait until you get to heaven and then you’ll be rewarded with paradise. I’m saying, ‘Look around you, this is a paradise….It’s a paradise here,’ and then if you look at the birds and nature and the way things grow, it’s all here now.”

Credit

Purchase, through funds from Mark and Judy Bednar in honor of William Heaton