The Furst Supper

I recently started fostering with Doggie Protective Services in the Bay Area. My most recent foster was found stray after the 4th of July, a holiday famous for putting immense pressure on shelters from terrified pets that run away from home to escape the random fireworks. My new foster was also found to be quite pregnant.

The rescue organization picked her up at the Solano County shelter and I picked her up. Everyone was expecting her to whelp (birthing for dogs) immediately. We were fortunate to spend the next 10 days waiting for puppies and getting used to each other.

Once the big day (actually middle of the night) happened, we were witnesses to the miracle of new life. At one point I was particularly in awe of the voraciousness of the babies and the magic of lactation. When they nursed they would get into crazy positions just to reach a nipple, then adjust all over again to reach another nipple. I was particularly involved in this at the start because one puppy wasn’t gaining weight like the others. My job was to put him on a nipple when he wasn’t already there. This intervention was best all around because it kept the natural process and eventually just stopped. If I gave formula via a syringe, I would have to continue to do that for the duration.

At one point I imagined these babies like the cherubic angels in a renaissance painting and said as much to several friends. Can’t you see the resemblance between these chubby butts?

View of the frescoed ceiling of the Grand staircase of the Palais Kinsky in Vienna, at the Freyung. The palace was owned by the noble Kinsky von Wichnitz und Tettau comital family. It was constructed during the baroque age as a Stadtpalais (city-palace).
Photo By Gryffindor – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1008198

Then I got the idea to actually paint it. So I started researching the renaissance style. This summary at Master Class provides a great list of features like use linear perspective and atmospheric perspective. So I looked through examples to find something I’d like to replicate. The room that “The Last Supper” is set in is weird, but not too detailed. So I went with that.

I didn’t want to get stuck in a bunch of architectural detail like “The School of Athens”. I also wanted to feature something akin to a “maiden in repose” but I couldn’t find anything exactly like that from the Renaissance era. I chose “A Young Lady Reclining on a Chaise Longue” by Lemaire-Colle Madeleine because the blue and white fabric draped over the chair looked like the Madonna’s robes.

Then I sort of munged up most of the rest of my Art History class from 30 years ago regarding representations of the Madonna and hagiography and ladies in repose on a chaise lounge and came up with a basic composition.

Then I started mocking that up in photoshop. I put the chair in front of the last supper, then assembled 4 different puppy shots.

As I painted, I freestyled a pillow for Mama’s head to fill the space and also show the saintly aspects of motherhood. Then of course I needed to pun the name, and now we have “The Furst Supper”.