R W Basset

R.W. Basset

"The Portrait of Jesus from the Turin Shroud - Uncolored and Colored"
11' X 14' graphite on paper

Basset labored endlessly trying to bring forth an accurate rendering of the man of the Shroud. The artist explained "The beauty and the sublimity of the original image always seemed to exceed anything that I was able to render for others to see." It became a passion for the artist to enable others to see clearly a coutenance that he came to appreciate as nothing less than truly profound. Click on image to see detail view.

In fact, certain peculiarities about the image continued to obscure the vision the artist longed to capture. "The more the image was clarified while remaining true to its geographic relationships, the more the image took on an amorphic distortion. This imparted a "mask-like' quality to the image that brought into question the Shrouds ability to be definitive enough for the artist to make use of."

"I was left with the awesome realization, however, that the "amorphic" areas of distortion were due to the fact that the cloth had draped a three-dimensional form. The perceptable countenance that I first encountered in the photo-negative image back in 1978, was sufficient to shift my belief in favor of the Shroud's authenticity. This additional discovery only reinforced that belief."

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