I drew Brown after Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in Its Tomb. It seemed the most natural way to compose a dead body bluntly, clearly, yet respectfully. Because how else does a corpse look otherwise?   “A sleeping body” won’t do, and he wasn’t viciously mangled or suffered horrendous dislocation, or such. I learned of the painting after Dostoevsky’s obsession with it, depicted in The Idiot : It so gripped him that his wife had to drag him away lest it cause him another seizure.

As for the general style of the piece, I was always impressed by the raw energy of German Expressionist woodcuts. Many of them depicted contemporary social realities, rather than scenes of myth or religion; even the ones that treat religion aren’t religious works themselves, but depict the social content of worship. So many of these artworks, carved in the devastation of the wake of the Great War, concerned themselves with politics. A favourite piece of mine—and I hadn’t seen it when I made Autocracy—is Frans Masereel’s Businessman, created in 1920, pictured here.

I had fun making a businessman in a fluffy bathrobe, working from home. The red wine, of course, you know, blood. And the shadows of blood seeping from the cars, I think I did well. I know it does date things a bit to depict these companies as a brutal strongman; now our images of billionaires aren’t fat men with bags of money and gout, but the Elon Musks, the Steve Jobses, the Jeff Bezoses. Looking at this now, in 2024, I worry that it won’t resonate with people. Is the corpse enough? Are the angry autoworkers purple with anger enough? The cars are green like American dollars, is that going to make sense to people internationally or will it just be a weird stylistic choice? At least I depicted the UAW logo as a SARS-CoV-2 viron, which I thought at the time was pretty neat, but should I have made it something more black-and-white, or a different palette, rather than yellow like the sun?

This, along with the Rebekah Jones piece, as you can see, are the last of my political works for several years. I actually too contracted COVID—and I’m still dealing with the post-acute sequelae to this day. The involuntary, forced change to my lifestyle impelled me to to focus on different things just to survive, just to stay sane, and my focus on politics ebbed. I think, as a political work, this isn’t a bad piece, but I wish I had made something (a major work; I consider the Rebekah Jones piece relatively minor) sharper than this.