Jimmy Lueders, Portrait of Armand Mednick

The monumental scale of this painting suggests the significance of the friendship between Jimmy Lueders and Armand Mednick. Here, Lueders employs gestural brushstrokes and builds a painterly surface referencing, it seems, the tactile and organic qualities of Mednick's ceramic pots. Mednick explained:

Jimmy encompasses my whole life in that picture by having a huge version of one of my Holocaust tiles in the background and one of my pots in the lower-right foreground. It connects my past, present, and future. . .  In the background of the painting are the ovens where the members of my family were burned. The arching forms are the ovens, and there's a figure in one of them. At the time he made this painting he used a lot of my pots as vases for flowers in his paintings. The manner of depicting light was so important to Jimmy.