His first piece on canvas depicted the last thing he saw before losing consciousness that day in Manila: a tunnel, at the end of which was a bright beam.
The contours of the depicted canvas, painted with a grey mixture of lead white and bone black, mask the cobalt (Co) and tin (Sn) emissions, showing that these were also painted on top of the mountain blue.
That 1962 oil on canvas, depicting a twisted naked man clutching an empty glass, his reflection visible in the red foreground, did not sell.
Another top Iranian seller in Dubai: A 2007 work by Farhad Moshiri, made of thousands of crystals mounted on canvas, depicting a map of the world, hammered down at $601,000.
His first workup was a 41 × oil on canvas depicting tolerance as "the basis for a democracy's religious diversity".
Surrounding the altar is a series of paintings on canvas, depicting the Passion of Christ by Jose Villegas, painted in the 17th century.
Painters had been depicting their own likenesses on canvas for centuries, but the coincidental nature of these two moments is historic: at the same time as we began to see our reflection in the home, the car, the elevator and the gym, we began to capture and keep our image with a camera.
In a recent show, "Behind the Mask," his steel sculptures and acrylics on canvas mostly depicted voodoo gods and goddesses represented in forms the artist said came to him in dreams.
For instance, Ralph Earl's "Gentleman With Attendant," from around 1785 to 1788, an oil-on-canvas painting, depicts an unidentified Caucasian "gentleman" with a much younger African-American "attendant".
The oil-on-canvas painting depicts the worshipping of a calf by the Israelites during the absence of Moses as he climbed Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the Ten Commandments.
