Written by DCist contributor Adrian Parsons.

Chawky Frenn tells me to look up. I do so, and I see nothing. Chawky tells me to get on his bed. Hmmm. I lay on his bed and look up. Nothing. He jumps on the bed and points up. A poster of Pieter Bruegel's hell looms above us. Seeing I'm sufficiently weirded out, Frenn explains, "I wake up to this painting every day to remind me of the despair. This is for everyone, there is no escaping it."

This is to a 20-something who's scared to floss in the mornings.

My studio visit last Friday was with Chawky Frenn, a painter who has authored a compelling solo show at Bethesda's Fraser Gallery full of meat, plastinated heads, Catholic mythology, and unmistakable skill. After seeing the show a couple of weeks ago I was left with heavy questions that I hoped the George Mason University professor could answer. Like, what is a plastinated head?

Before the thorough tour of his Rosslyn studio, I saw the dolls. He pointed them out to me.

"These are my babies," he said.

Two hundred (his own estimate) baby doll heads stacked on a crowded bookshelf. They are sexless, hairless, and, for Frenn, their BakeLite to Barbie plastic variations transcend race and gender. "They are beautiful and anonymous. My earliest work was only heads. People gave me baby doll heads from Italy, some heirlooms."

We reached the bedroom and he introduced me to his companion, an actual human skeleton named "Companion." “I got this from a professor," Frenn boomed proudly. The room is covered in others works, his inspirations. George Nick, a painter and mentor that echoes Frenn's own style, hangs here prominently beside Frenn's familiar lush palette that coyly belies his dark subject matter.

In the kitchen he pours drinks and I torch crème brulée. As we imbibe artsy food clichés, the relaxing effect of the sugars and the alcohol just makes the work here in the living room more vibrant and creepy. I have to paraphrase the interview after the wine.

Frenn doesn't trust much of anything. “I saw a child climb a couch. The young toddler's father told him to jump in to his arms and as the kid leaps the father moves and the child falls. 'You've just learned your first lesson, never trust anyone but yourself.'”

And looking at his tarp-carpeted living room, unfinished paintings on top of unfinished paintings, it's possible that Frenn mistrusts himself as well. The work is based in the dogmatic staples of religion and myth, but he quizzically pairs those subjects with ambiguous violence and child portraiture.

It is worth the trek to Bethesda to see Frenn's unsettling show. Consider the time on the red line to wonder about the plastinated heads (plastic-injected dead tissue preservation). You have to break through the thick rules that the Lebanese painter lives by and literally wakes up to.

“My work is meditation, not action. These are just questions for you, the viewer.” And here I came for answers and a drink.

New Paintings by Chawky Frenn at the Fraser Gallery through March 8.