If “Aria for the Brittle Bones of Winter” is not as popular as even the experimental “Through His Eyes,” it may be because Lake has employed too personal an iconography, the painting meaningful only to him. Whereas in “Invitation” or “Burning House,” the viewer feels empowered—welcomed—to share in the personal revelation, “Aria…” feels like a closed system, the artist’s eye looking too far inward. Even the doubling of image and name, the weak pun implicit in the painting’s lake and the painter Lake, cannot help us to understand the underpinnings of such a work. As Venturi wrote, “While Lake’s canvases do not generally inflict a new language upon us, when they do, we have no guide to translate for us.” The controversial art critic Bibble has gone so far as to write, in reference to “Aria,” “[Lake’s] paintings are so many tombstones, so many little deaths—on canvases too big for the wall in their barely suppressed violence.”

Be this as it may, there are linked themes, linked resonances, between “Invitation,” “Through His Eyes,” and “Aria…” These are tenuous connections, even mysterious connections, but I cannot fail to make them.

Lake appears in all three paintings—and only these three paintings. Only in the second painting, “Through His Eyes,” do the insect catcher and Bender appear together. The insect catcher does appear in “Invitation” but not in “Aria…” (where, admittedly, he would be a bizarre and unwelcome intrusion). Bender appears in “Aria” and is implied in “Through His Eyes,” but does not appear, implied or otherwise, in “Invitation.” The question becomes: Does the insect catcher inhabit “Aria” unbeknownst to the casual observer—perhaps even in the frozen graveyard? And, more importantly, does the spirit of Voss Bender in some way haunt the canvas that is “Invitation to a Beheading”?—From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of the Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for The Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.

Afterward, Lake stumbled out into the night. The fog had dissipated and the stars hung like pale wounds in the sky. He flung off his frog mask, retched in the gutter, and staggered to a brackish public fountain, where he washed his hands and arms to no avail: the blood would not come off. When he looked up from his frantic efforts, he found the mushroom dwellers had abandoned their battle with the pigs to watch him with wide, knowing eyes.

“Go away!” he screamed. “Don’t look at me!”

Farther on, headed at first without direction, then with the vague idea of reaching his apartment, he washed his hands in public restrooms. He sanded his hands with gravel. He gnawed at them. None of it helped: the stench of blood only grew thicker. He was being destroyed by something larger than himself that was still somehow trapped inside him.