Note: I finished this in 2025 – I just never posted it to the website.
Every painter who has ever picked up a brush in the last sixty years owes Warhol a debt and an argument. The debt is obvious — he proved that bold, flat colour against a strong ground could carry genuine spiritual weight. The argument is this: thirty-two Marilyns in a grid is magnificent once. It becomes wallpaper by the third print run.
This piece began as a tribute to exactly that tradition. Gold ground, high contrast, flattened form — the visual DNA of a Warhol screen print, translated into acrylic. Anubis as icon. The idea had merit.
Then the jackal had other plans.
Somewhere in the process the painting stopped being a tribute and started being a conversation. The anthropomorphic god refused to stay in his single frame, so a second panel arrived — the pure jackal form, recumbent, collared in red, ancient and watchful. A winged scarab claimed the upper left corner as its own territory. White geometric lines divided the surface like a comic book page, and suddenly the whole thing had the structure of sequential art rather than pop repetition.
Which, on reflection, is far more honest to the subject matter. Anubis is a god of passage and transformation. He does not stand still for his portrait. He guides, he weighs, he opens the way — three distinct functions rendered here as three distinct panels. Warhol’s genius was the freeze-frame, the idol held perpetually in amber. Anubis resists that entirely.
The gold ground remained. In Egyptian funerary art it signified the flesh of the gods, the light that persisted inside the Duat between one sunrise and the next. That much, Warhol and the Old Kingdom agree upon: gold means something permanent lives here.
Pop Psychopomp. The icon who refuses to be merely iconic. Available,