{"product_id":"temptation-2008-oil-on-canvas-by-stacy-stewart-smith","title":"Temptation, 2009 Oil on Canvas by Stacy Stewart Smith","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTemptation\u003c\/em\u003e is the painting that does not look away.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe final work of the \u003cem\u003eResurrection\u003c\/em\u003e series, this monumental oil on canvas — 54\" × 80\" — closes the cycle not with transcendence but with confrontation. Where earlier works in the series reached toward the divine, \u003cem\u003eTemptation\u003c\/em\u003e turns the gaze inward, toward the most human of failures: the capacity to hate, and the silence that allows it to grow.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAt the left of the composition, a colossal ear rendered in daubs of Cadmium red and Rose Madder dominates the canvas. It is not a portrait. It is an address. It is you — the viewer — being asked to listen, and in listening, to reckon. Across the canvas, a darkened town sits beneath a cooling sunset, rendered in deep Prussian blues, its stillness the stillness of willful blindness. And suspended above it, almost imperceptible in its smallness: a tiny noose. The disproportion is the point. Hatred begins small. It is always small, until it is not.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eSmith’s \u003cem\u003eAbstractrealism\u003c\/em\u003e here operates at its most prophetic. The painting was completed in 2009, but its vision of American racial hatred — its capacity to smolder quietly, to be fed by power, to become colossal — reads as a work that knew what was coming. It is a painting about end times, yes, but more precisely about the moment before them: the private moment when we are alone with the conception of our own sin.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFor those whom this painting will offend, it is a call to ask oneself why.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOil on Canvas · 54\" × 80\" · 2009\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne-of-a-kind original. Shipping insurance is strongly recommended; please add it to your acquisition.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Stacy Stewart Smith Enterprises, Inc.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":59119757197393,"sku":"SSS-TEMPTOP-ORIG","price":83000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0998\/9311\/7009\/files\/Temptation_Stacy_Stewart_Smith_2008_oil-canvas_54x80_cd1aa7ce-564c-442d-aa3f-adf9807ce3ba.jpg?v=1771640494","url":"https:\/\/stacystewartsmith.com\/it\/products\/temptation-2008-oil-on-canvas-by-stacy-stewart-smith","provider":"Stacy Stewart Smith","version":"1.0","type":"link"}