The Music Lesson, Late Afternoon by Mitch Nolte, 2013. Oil on canvas.

Artist’s note:

As the sun slowly begins to set, Lucifer plays his pipe while the eyes of a soulless angel stare at us, smiling as her hair branches off into individual clarinets, whose forms are as bent and twisted as that of Lucifer’s morality. In the center a voluptuous figure, burnt to an almost whitish hue by the sun, bends over seductively as though to lure us closer to this mysterious scene. It identity is unknown,as we cannot see its face. In the lower right-hand corner, lies a shape that one might describe as a limp sea anemone. I myself think it could be a self-portrait, drawn unconsciously on the paper without even recognizing it.