Photo by Travis Levius of Mister Levius Photography: MisterLevius.com A couple years ago while living in St. Louis, I briefly dated a supermarket checker. He worked at a store located in the Bosnian part of St. Louis, and apparently Bosnians have some speciality ethnic recipes that involve an entire lamb's head. After selling a number of these lamb heads, he decided this would make a good gift for me. He came over one day after work, and let me know he had a special present for me, and handed me a wrapped-up frozen lamb head, complete with eye balls, tongue, and brain. This was, incidentally, one of the nicest and most thoughtful presents anyone has every given to me.
Since I was living with a vegetarian at the time, I hid the lamb's head in the freezer, as I didn't want my roommate to get weirded out, beyond the level of weirded out that living with me probably entails. I spent the next couple of months living in fear that I would come home from work and he would be waiting for me to ask what was in the freezer and why did it have eyes. I also had to decide what to do with the head. Although I considered eating it, I didn't think that would do it justice. Also, I'm not a very good cook, and who knows what you would do with the tongue and brain.
I left the lamb head in the freezer and figured eventually I would have a good inspiration for what to do with it. I toyed with a couple of possible ideas, although the only one I can remember at this point was a thought about putting the head on a leash and dragging it around the neighborhood to see how people would react. In the summer of 2007, Damien Hirst made a big splash when he unveiled "For the Love of God," which was a platinum cast of a human skull coated with thousands of diamonds, valued at tens of millions of dollars.
The title of his piece came from his mom, who at one point said to him, "For the love of God, what are you going to do next?" Here is some more information on Damien Hirst and "For the Love of God." He is one of my favorite artists, and that sculpture is one of my favorite pieces by him.
At this point, it occurred to me that I could turn my lamb head into a similar work, as a commentary on "For the Love of God." I had attended a Jewish artistic summer camp in the summer of 2007 where I had the chance to meet Raffael Lomas, an extremely talented Israel sculptor. My time with him is what inspired me to begin creating artwork. Since I'm relatively new to this whole art business, I was excited about getting started on the lamb head, partly because I had been doing some painting previously, and working with the lamb head would hopefully allow me to try out some new techniques and develop my skills.
My first problems was that I had a skull with all the meaty bits still on it, and I needed just the bone. Since being gifted the skull, I had actually moved once while I was deciding what to do with it and was living with another vegetarian who happened to be quite fastidious about keeping the house clean. I did a little research, and the best two options seemed to be either leaving the skull outside secured in some sort of box or cage where ants could pick it clean or else rendering it on a stove for an extended period of time. Neither of these seemed like a great thing to inflict upon my roommate, but luckily my good friend Steve volunteered his apartment.
I came over one morning, dumped the lamb head into a big pot, threw in a little detergent to help break down the fat, and set it to a low simmer.
We took off for a day of fun, and came back 8 or 10 hours later to check on things, and lamb head had pretty thoroughly cooked.
We decided he could use some more time percolating so we headed out again so he could really get adequately stewed. I should also note that even though we had a door open to help ventilate the place, it still smelled terrible.
By this point, the simmering had removed most of the fat and muscle from the skull, and it was mostly clean except for the brain. I took it home, scraped out the brains with a long spoon, sprayed it down with some bleach, and left it out in the sun in the back yard to help prepare it for painting.
After a couple days being sprayed down with bleach and hanging out in the sun, the skull was ready for painting. I initially used a gray spray paint and picked up some glass diamond beads from WalMart to get started.
I realized that I wasn't so happy with the spray paint color that I had, and also that I had spaced out the diamonds too much on the skull and it wasn't looking like I had envisioned it would. At this point, although the piece was far from done, I ran out of time to work on it as the year ended, and life intervened. I packed up the skull, and all my other belongings, drove them back to Southern California, stashed them in my parents' garage, and flew off to Israel for a year. While in Israel, I worked on a series of paintings and mixed media pieces using a Star of David motif.
Upon my return to America, I started digging all of my belongings out of my parents' garage. I thought I had unpacked all my boxes and had a moment of fear when I couldn't find the skull anywhere. After two days of mourning over the loss of the piece, I found the missing final box with my half-finished project. At that point, I swung by Home Depot to pick up some new spray paint (shiny silver this time) and to Joann's for some more glass beads so I could complete the bedazzling. First I gave it a shiny new coat of paint.
Then I got to work bedazzling.
My parents seemed a little curious about what I was up to, although I don't think they realized it was a real animal skull that I was working on. After I finished gluing on all the diamonds, I took "For the Love of Damien Hirst" outside to show off his sparkle.
"For the Love of Damien Hirst" was recently entered in the Emory Arts Competition, and out of 80 entries, was one of the 8 finalists in the competition.
