My artwork “Head full of Angels” is just that — a profile of a woman in the manner of a quarter-length Renaissance portrait, composed of hundreds of different angels, cupids, cherubim, and seraphim. These celestial messengers, go-betweens of God and man, exist in Western and Eastern art traditions as far back as the ancient Greeks.

The image began with a palette of over a thousand angels plucked from many different pictorial sources. It is the result of several years of collecting illustrations and several months of late nights spent carefully cutting the angels out from the original stories in which they were the players. One angel in the collage may originally have been holding a flaming sword, expelling Adam and Eve from Paradise. Another was curing Tobit’s blindness; one was depicted playing celestial music for Enoch in heaven. One was God himself disguised as the angel wrestling Jacob. And yes, some were culled from Christian scenes — Annunciations and Last Judgments; some even accompanied Mohammed on his tiered ascension.

Here in my assemblage, removed from their original contexts, they have no specific past. Now parts of a whimsical image meant only to delight, they neither proselytize nor preach any particular religious doctrine or faith. They are simply angels — those marvelous universal, winged, sometimes haloed creatures of the world’s imagination.

The picture also contains a hidden pun. The eye of the woman which appears to depict an angelic gathering on a solar scale, is actually an electron microscope photograph of a subatomic particle, thus giving new life to the absurd medieval theological debate about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. More than previously imagined. Here, of course, my method of construction inverts the question to ask how many angels one cam pin to a head.

-Stephen Parlato

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