#also in rereading this neither of these are paintings lololol sorry

[boyhood]

this is an odd request but an Earnest one...

Do you have any favorite paintings of wounds?

Sorry it took me a second to get to this- I have been genuinely thinking about it and trying to come up with an answer.

I think my answer is this:

It is listed in Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages, by Jack Hartnell as

"A page from a devotional book made for an unknown Englishwoman soon after 1480, showing a mass of Christ’s blood and the individual wounds of his skin."

I find this work incredibly moving, and touching, because the body has been so abstracted but the wounds are very real. Wound after wound after wound with blood on a background of bloodied skin. There's something really powerful to me about the wound as subject, as focus, but taken entirely away from the body.

This work, to me, is more meaningful than other Jesus's side wound works, because the focus becomes not on the individual would that killed him, or the entrance of Thomas's hand into the wound to prove its realness, but the multitude of wounds that destroy together, cumulatively.

I also think about the work The Burden of Guilt by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (1997) in which the artist stands naked, wearing the flayed body of a lamb while eating soil mixed with salt and water (representing tears).

For 45 minutes, Bruguera ate the soil in reference to stories about indigenous Cubans vowing to eat only soil rather than be captives to Spanish colonists.

The writer Edward Rubin described the work as "[a] harrowing piece... first performed in Havana, where the audience was duly reminded that freedom, liberty, and self-determination are not abstract ideals, but achievements that deeply inscribe their meaning on our physical being."

I like this work for a multitude of reasons, but like it as an image of a transposed wound, a wounded body representing the bodies of many, and of taking on of generational wounds, both literal and figurative.