We’re back with a painting based on a medieval morality painting. Check it out below:

I wanted to make a painting that reflected how greed works in Pittsburgh in 2025. It’s hard not to think of the giant, predatory, technically non profit health companies that operate here in Pittsburgh. I had a friend work in one of them during COVID, where they kept paying for more and more travel nurses (who cost…so much) instead of paying nurses more money. Most friends I’ve had who have worked for them have talked about how soul sucking it is, and how tepid they feel about themselves morally having a job with the company.

I think there is something diabolic at work with how fraud, waste, and tax evasion works. There’s this strange distribution of perpetration and guilt that is hard to pin down on any perpetrators but ultimately feels pretty bleak. I wonder sometimes if it’s lack of transparency- like, if you could open the books and see everything that happened it would be clear that it was all Mary from Account’s fault or something. I doubt it though.

The painting depicts medieval coins, treasure being extracted by a surgeon while imps cheer on the process. It’s wood, paper, acrylic- the usual suspects. I think this style works really well – I might come back to it for a grocery knight sequel (Grocery Knight: Quest to Costco) I like the drama and physical positioning- the staging of the painting. It felt like I had control of the blocking and was able to make something stylistically different than my other work. I think that have masked faces allows for something more symbolic- the subject is more of a cypher. I’ve wanted to make more universal feeling portraits, to create characters that people could connect to. This might be a way forward to do it.