Roy Nachum's Metamorphosis

Writers and artists share this trait: they must be as exposed and transparent as their hearts will allow if they want to connect with and inspire their audiences. That is part of what makes all of art’s forms so captivating and transcendent; there are few actions more deeply revealing than art, and artists of every form display who they are in their entirety through the smallest details, attempting to drag their audiences by the arm into their own flesh. I can connect to Roy Nachum’s Metamorphosis, an oil painting, through the ways in which it shows the aforementioned artist’s openness and the ways in which it shows, inversely, human guardedness with clever and unconventional visual methods. I can connect to this painting because I understand …show more content…
Metamorphosis’s lion wears a skull as its mask. The lion here has created an exoskeleton: something to protect its skin rather than its organs. The skull mask further serves to protect its wearer by being specifically situated into a roaring position, a message to keep back. As previously mentioned, Nachum emphasizes the importance of the skull’s maw in his piece with his use of color; viewers are meant to first see the skull’s sharp, massive teeth, and they are meant to know that the skull mask, with its teeth, protects the lion as any meaningless, spiteful quips protect the viewers themselves. Nachum is showing himself and so many others in Metamorphosis; he is the lion as well as his audience, fearsome yet impersonal and simply observing, hidden behind his skull mask and bearing his teeth to keep himself protected. I can see myself as well in this piece, and I feel, with unyielding certainty, that I too am the lion along with the entire world. I see this painting as a whole and my mind just tells me, ferocious. That is what I am; that is what I have made myself. And I too lie myself out to the world willingly and regularly as Nachum has done by showing the world himself in his lion; when I write, I display myself through each character I create and in all of my commentary. In this essay alone, one might notice how I refer to the skull mask’s teeth or the lion’s eyes and know a whole section of me, perhaps implicitly. The multiplicity of ways in which I can relate to Metamorphosis is what makes the work so appealing and fascinating to me; I feel the uniqueness in which I can call myself a writer, an artist, and I feel the universal qualities and unity of the human