It is perhaps not surprising that the darker the subject matter, the more questions people have about a painting. And so I am going to take a moment and go behind the scenes of one of my more morbid pieces, dually inspire by the First Battle of Ypres and the Parisian Catacombs: Kindermord.

First, some background.

If you ever have the opportunity, The Catacombs of Paris are not to be missed. Far below the bustling streets of one of the most crowded city in the world lie six million of skeletons forever interred in 200 hundred miles of tunnels. Created in the late 1700 to deal with cemetery overcrowding, some of the skeletons date back 1,200 years.

It’s gnarly.

My first visit to The Catacombs was deeply impactful. Standing in a tiny room surrounded by piles of anonymous bones stacked six feet high is not only a reminder of your mortality, but also of the probable insignificance of your entire existence.

Yeah kinda dark, you were warned.

Three years later, I began to work on a painting of The Catacombs while listening to a podcast on WWI. If you don’t know much about WWI, let me sum it up for you: it was extremely brutal. One early battle in particular, The First Battle of Ypres, punched me in the gut.

By October of 1914, the German army had already suffered heavy losses during the Race to the Sea. At this point ranks needed to be refilled and as war was still thought of as a glorious endeavor, an onslaught of young German reservists, some reportedly as young as 16 years old, were brought into battle. Green and untested, these recruits were rushed into the field with little training and pitted against the war-hardened, experienced forces at Ypres.

It did not go well.

Now, there is a lot of dispute about what took place at the battle, including the actual number of causalities, and the role the reservists actually played. Many historians have concluded that participation of the young Germans was grossly overstated to serve as a rallying cry for German war efforts.

And although we are now walking the narrow road between truth and myth, it is clear that the Germans suffered enormous causalities, and that a great number of those killed were the young reservists.

After the war, this battle would come to be named “Kindermord” or the massacre of the innocents in German.

It was with these dual inspirations of mortality, The Catacombs and Kindermord, that I approached the painting named after the latter. Beyond that, I encourage the viewer to draw their own inspiration and interpretation of the piece as it relates to their life and experiences.