Building A Sin

Charles Baker Strahan (b. 1975) Building A Sin, Oil on canvas Artist’s Collection

“Building A Sin” is an exploration of the psychic cost of stepping into one’s authentic self while navigating the restrictive architectures of religion, society, and inherited shame. Strahan constructs a fractured urban landscape—part city, part psychological terrain—through which multiple versions of the male body struggle, strain, suspend, and break open.

Erotic imagery functions not for provocation, but as a clarifying tension: the literal human form is set against abstracted social and religious narratives that attempt to confine it. The figures in bondage and restraint reference both the external pressures of identity can sublimate into sexuality, revealing desire as both rebellion and survival.

Natural materials—rock, water, earth—intervene as metaphors for emotional truth. The water below the central figure suggests that emotion, like erosion, can wear down even the hardest structures. In this world, “sin” is not the act of being oneself; it is the cost imposed upon the individual for daring to be whole.

The composition becomes a visual manifesto: a queer body asserting its agency while navigating the cultural, familial, and spiritual architectures that would prefer it remain divided. The painting names the struggle, refuses its shame, and reclaims the narrative of “sin” as an act of self-construction rather than self-betrayal.