Self-Portrait as Mohammed Wrestling the Angel Gabriel
by Beston Barnett
acrylic on plywood, 4 ft. x 4 ft.
Beston: I painted this self-portrait from a photo Orna Amir took for me. The butterfly pattern is incised into the wood with a dremel tool, then painted over. People never seem to notice that it's the bass, standing in for the Angel Gabriel, that has the wings. The story goes that Mohammed mistook Gabriel for the devil and wrestled with him all one night; in the morning, when he saw he could not win, he knew that his opponent must be an angel. There's a long tradition of artists practicing by painting themselves into classical stories: no disrespect is intended.
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This photo was taken by Orna Amir for the painting that became the Chrysalis cover.
Beston first released Chrysalis on MP3.com in 1999. It was the heyday of the website (though it crashed with all the other luckless dot-coms a few years later), and the single "Dark Disguise" sat at #1 on the Hip-Hop charts for nearly a year, garnering hundreds of thousands of listens, even beating out the debut solo single from Q-Tip (of A Tribe Called Quest) for a few months. Beston was Hip-Hop Artist of the Year, which didn't mean a lot of sales, but did mean a lot of publicity and fan-mail. The hilarious emails for movie placements at left came within days of each other.
