The New Wine

“The New Wine,” an original mixed-media painting and contemporary spiritual artwork, explores the redemptive power of even the smallest good deeds. The title and its expressive, distressed text came to me while listening to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which contains a powerful tale about the gift of a single onion. That word is still visible at the center of the canvas, half-buried under layers of scrubbed and re-scattered pigment.

The full tale describes a wicked woman doomed to hell whose guardian angel finds a single good deed to her name: giving an onion to a beggar. This simple act of grace was what I sought to capture. Like a seed, this sentiment was sown rough and buried beneath distressed paint, becoming the fertile ground for it to grow in the subconscious.

This large canvas art stands 4 feet tall by 3 feet wide (48” x 36”), stretched on gallery-quality 1.5” kiln-dried stretchers. The raw, painted edges offer a glimpse into the creative process, making the piece feel complete and ready to hang as is. Primarily acrylic on canvas, the artwork also incorporates glass bead gel and hard pastels for a rich, tactile surface. I used various paint thinners to create the distressed effect, while palette knives and a squeegee were used to manipulate the stripped paint to create this textural painting.