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Just Passing Through, 1996
Oil on linen, 60 x 80”
Gift of the artist

Just Passing Through is a modern day memento mori, or reminder of death, with an existential twist. It presents a typical Haitian cemetery with numerous tombs and grave markers, most brightly painted and decorated. Such a graveyard might be seen in someone’s front yard, where it might overshadow the house itself by its size, cheerful colorful and the quality of material from which it is constructed. Although a place for the dead, Phipps notes that “graveyards are part of life—cows, goats or sheep are left grazing there by peasants on their way to or from the fields—The grass is good and abundant.”  Thus the cemetery, which reminds us that we are all fated to die and return to dust, evinces the inseparability of death from life, for the one feeds the other both figuratively and literally.

Phipps has composed the painting in receding fields, each with its own decorative attractions. At the forefront, the cement wall is filled with jewel-like painted stones. Behind it goats and a lone cow establish a rhythm of heads and faces crossing from left to right. Almost like a church screen or iconostasis, the next wall with its diamond patterns in glass and paint establish the inner space of the cemetery—a space where many predominantly blue structures mark burials. Woods with occasion boughs of green close the space and provide a dark foil for the brilliant fore and middle grounds.