The original idea for this piece was to do a self-portrait in the vein of Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son. The child would be replaced with my cat, Job, and Saturn would instead be devouring himself. I saw it as a sort of throwback to when I decided to have the hardest life possible and dedicate myself to art at 16. I was learning to play guitar and trying to write songs but coming up against the reality that I had no actual experience to draw on, so nothing tangible to write about. I was doing terrible knockoffs of other people's already shit work, owing to my teenage tastes, and the path forward was obviously...experience.

According to one of the Greek Myths involving Marsyas, a satyr, homeboy thinks he's a pretty stellar musician and challenges the god, Apollo, to a dick measuring contest regarding their respective abilities to play music. The thing would be judged by the muses or some nymphs or whatever, there are different versions of the story, and the winner would be able to do whatever they wanted with the loser. Marsyas is first up and puts everyone into a frenzy with his flute skills, the judges dance their asses off. Apollo then strums his lyre, essentially an old-timey guitar, so beautifully that everyone begins to weep with emotion. Well, looks like we have a tie. Can a base creature, representing the self-taught earthen chaos of the bodily self, really be capable of matching the output of a god, representing the higher brain and ego of organized thought and learned craftsmanship? Can the left hand path match the right in its power? In my favorite version of the story, Apollo broke the tie by adding his voice into the mix, singing and playing simultaneously. Marsyas sure as shit couldn't sing and play his flute at the same time, so Apollo was voted winner and he decided to make an example of his opponent. He tethered the satyr to a tree and flayed the entirety of his skin from his living body. There are several excellent depictions of this story in classical art but my favorite comes from Jusepe De Ribera, which greatly inspired this piece.

There's a gulf between my original intention of realizing my art through music and where I am now as a painter. This turn toward Marsyas and Apollo illustrates my ultimate turn away from music as my vehicle of creative expression. Apollo is here depicted as my old bandmate, Connor. This casts me as Marsyas, throwing down my flute and getting started on the flaying of flesh with my own teeth right away.

- Cherry-Apple Peach 4/25/23