david eustace

my townspeople!

an ongoing project revolving around a large work on canvas, to create a space which invites the visitor to commemorate the dead and consider their own relationship to mortality

2016 - present

Taking its title & cue from the opening verse of ‘Tract’ by American poet William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963), my townspeople! depicts a gathering of rough-sketched snowpeople rendered in rusted iron, in the same attitude and circumstance of the peasant mourners of the great funereal painting ‘Burial at Ornans’ by 19th century French realist Gustave Courbet (1819 - 1877).

Replacing the detailed figures of Courbet’s crowd with the figures of snowpeople is meant to lighten the load, the way drinks or bad jokes do at a wake, and to remind the viewer of the living community around them, whoever that may be, while offering access to the casteless & classless human imperative of grief and grieving.

While during its day Courbet’s painting drew ire for realistically depicting the 19th century lower class in such a large ‘grand’ painting, the classless and casteless figures of snowpeople in my townspeople! are meant to draw not ire but simply our attention to the ritual itself.

Or as the narrator of Williams’ poem, revealed to be the collective voice of the dead, admonishes us at the end of the poem:

”What — from us? We who have perhaps
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us — it will be money
in your pockets. Go now
I think you are ready.”