You see the top of his head first — the white zucchetto, the wire-rim glasses, the broad forehead of a man who looks like he might actually listen if you told him something. And then the pigeon. A fat, blue-grey city pigeon, perched right on top of the papal skullcap, talons gripping the fabric, looking out at you with the calm authority of something that has decided this is its spot now.

Jonathan Blum paints people from the forehead up. That's the conceit — he started it with a cartoon self-portrait in Boston in 1986 and never stopped. The restriction became the signature. Rabbis, popes, dogs, ostriches, Bert from Sesame Street — all of them cropped at the bridge of the nose, all of them wearing or balancing something on their heads that tells you everything the rest of the face would have. In this case, it's a pigeon playing dove, roosting on the head of a pope who chose the name of a saint who preached to birds. The joke writes itself, except it isn't really a joke. Blum trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, spent time studying at a yeshivah in Jerusalem, and has been painting rabbis and holy men with genuine warmth for thirty years. The humor and the reverence are the same thing.

The background is a fractured mosaic of deep blues and purples — almost stained-glass in feeling — with a circular form behind the pigeon that reads unmistakably as a halo. The whole composition has the quality of a Byzantine icon reimagined by someone who lives above a bodega in Brooklyn, which is more or less exactly what Blum is. He's operated a 250-square-foot storefront studio on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope since 2000, door propped open in nice weather, selling directly to anyone who walks in. No exclusive gallery. No pretense. He's shown in New York, London, Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Provincetown. A 40-year retrospective was mounted at Arts Gowanus in 2025.

That's the conceit — he started it with a cartoon self-portrait in Boston in 1986 and never stopped.

Serigraph on paper. Edition of 100, this being number 67. Hand-signed and dated 2017 in pencil, lower right. Title inscribed in pencil at center. Professionally framed in a clean black frame with white mat.