I had the feeling he regarded me now as evil and malevolent, as a demonic and contaminating spawn of the Other Side. His thin face would fill with dread whenever he caught me looking at him. He said nothing to me about the drawings. Here Asher Lev plunges back into his childhood and recounts the story of love and conflict which dragged him to this crossroads. Into it he poured all the anguish and torment a Jew can feel when torn between the faith of his fathers and the calling of his art. I exaggerated the talons and painted ears of Charon I darkened his face, bringing out the whites of his raging eyes. Asher Lev is a gifted loner, the artist who painted the sensational Brooklyn Crucifixion. I made all the faces his face, pimply, scrawny-eyes bulging, mouths open, shrieking in horror. I drew the terror on the faces of the dead and the damned. I drew the writhing twisting tormented bodies spilling from the boat. I drew much of it from memory, but I wanted to be as accurate as I could, so I checked it repeatedly against a reproduction in a book I had purchased on Michelangelo. I did not understand what had happened to bring on the idea I drew with a pen, working slowly, calmly, and with ease, the segment from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment of the boat beached on the Styx and Charon striking at his doomed passengers with an oar, forcing them onto the shores of torment and hell.
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