Skull of Adam, Spring Garden St. oil on panel, 1998 26" X 18"   Click on picture below for detail view. Medieval and Renaissance paintings of the crucifixion often show a skull at the base of the cross. "Golgotha," the Hebrew name for the place Christ was crucified, means "place of the skull." Tradition has it that the remains of Adam, the first man, were buried on this site. Placing the skull of Adam at the base of the cross in traditional paintings represents the historical significance of the site and Christ's redemption of original sin. In this painting, I tried to capture the moment just after twilight, when the ground is dark, but the sun still illuminates the sky. The idea came one evening as I walked along Spring Garden street near my apartment in College Hill, a historic neighborhood in Greensboro. At the intersection of Mendenhall, the bright sky seemed to advance, as if it were closer than the dark objects in the foreground. One's eyes could only adjust to one or the other--they seemed part of separate worlds, yet both existed simultaneously. I wanted the viewer to be drawn to the bright sky, and only later to notice the skull at the base of the telephone pole, hidden in darkness. The contrast makes the skull nearly impossible to see in reproduction, so I enhanced it somewhat for this site. I like the way that one object transforms the entire scene because of its historic and religious associations. The star in the upper right of the frame and the tree behind the pole are also given new associations--with the birth of Christ and the original sin of Adam--by the inclusion of the skull. The building at right is an old firehouse. It was empty when I did the painting; it's now a general store. This painting won the 1998 Senior Thesis Purchase Award, and is now part of the permanent collection of the Guilford College Art Gallery in Hege Library. At a new acquisitions show in the Fall of 1998, the list of artists actually read: "Joseph Albers, Sue Coe, Bill Burg, Salvador Dali..."