wandering genie

We Bring The Greater Days

2012-03-08T07:40:00.001-08:00

Just a short update to make up for my silence. I've been busy and sick, and spending a couple days in bed with tissues crammed up my nose really put me behind work-wise and socially (and yeah, I have yet to post stuff in that etsy account oooops). Today was my first day up and about in a while and I picked a good day for it because it appears to be a very convincing false spring day. Nice. Anyway, the painting I'm working on for the Forgotten Gods show is nearly done (and would have BEEN done by now if not for the sickness). Just some sneak peaks:

The only part I have left to do:

I like seeing stuff at this stage, especially knowing that it defies what painting and drawing instructors told me about working on the whole piece slowly building all the areas together. The few classes I have taken I was always scolded for working in sections and though I get why, generally, that is a bad habit it ended up being perfect for the method I've invented for myself.

I've been meaning to note this for a while since I know everybody looooooves tumblr these days but I do have a seldom used tumblr account I may start using more. Last night I transcribed and posted a runic farting spell from a book I'm reading if that gives you any clue to the content.

In other news, the bat show now has a facebook invite with some images of the work that's coming in. If you use facebook feel free to check it out and spread the word! Getting really excited as it gets closer and also a bit nervous about the setback of this past week since I have my own piece to finish. However, the invites and posters are currently in production, and we're hoping to have something to bring to this excellent lecture on the impact of WNS coming up at the Wagner. If you live in Philly or nearby I would definitely recommend going!

Finally, Happy International Women's Day (everyday).

Everlasting Faint

2012-02-21T07:29:00.000-08:00

I got invited to be in a Mythology themed group show in March so I decided to throw another project in before I work on the bat show piece. I just couldn't pass up a show with this theme. I spent half a week going back and forth on my design. My issue is usually that I have a lot of ideas I've been thinking about for a while, just waiting for an appropriate project. It's never the case that I don't have ANY ideas I just sometimes have trouble figuring out which one is the RIGHT one. Anyway, I stopped freaking myself out and in two days designed, drew and inked this:
I'm pretty excited about how it's going so far but it's going to be a lot of detail work (snake and fish scales take foreverrrrrrr for me) so I need to get painting as soon as possible.

More info about what it is when I have a finished painting to post.

I also made an experimental etsy store last week to sell off the remaining heart pins from the heart show (there are actually a lot left) once I get them back. I'll probably put some really old prints in there too for really cheap since they're just cluttering up my studio. I'll update when that actually happens but for the time being here's the link. My heart pins in the Storage Heart Show didn't do great but my bigger piece in the Jinxed show sold right away which is cool!

In other news, the Alice Bag show/reading went really well two weeks ago and I have to say it was one of my more fulfilling experiences making art. It just feels great to contribute something to someone whose body of work has meant a lot to me. She's extremely nice and inspiring and somehow she ended up asking me for my autograph right off the bat. I did get her's too though:Ahhhh enough mooning, back to work, D'Angelo.

Until The End Of The World

2012-02-10T07:26:00.000-08:00

SO, I finished the piece I've been posting little bits of for a week or so. This will be in the OTHER heart show at Jinxed/Toothless Cat Gallery also this weekend. I know all this heart business is making me look very romantic but really I just love group shows.

When I was planning my trip to Portugal I came across the story of Dom Pedro and Doña Inés which is one part a tragic romance and one part a grotesque bit of folklore and I was instantly obsessed with it. To make a fairly long story (which you can read here) short, Inês was the great love of Dom Pedro and was assassinated by Dom Pedro's father the king in response to political pressure from advisers who feared the influence of her Castilian family. This prompted a war between father and son which eventually ended in a truce of sorts until the king died.

"As soon as he was crowned in 1357, and in spite of his promises of forgiveness, King Dom Pedro I recovered two of Inês' assassins from Castile, where they had sought refuge (the third had escaped to France). He then had them tortured and executed in a barbaric but highly symbolic way: from one of the men who had killed the love of his life, the heart was ripped out of the body through his back, and from the other, the heart was pulled out through the chest."

According to folklore the newly crowned king then had Inês' corpse exhumed, dressed in finery and crowned and had the entire court come to pay her respect as their queen and kiss her hand.

He also commissioned grandiose tombs for both of them which I went and saw at the Monastery of Alcobaça and had her body moved from its original resting place in a candlelit procession "between two lines of stars". The tombs are placed contrary to tradition foot to foot across from each other in the chapel of the monastery so that when the world ends and the dead rise they would each (theoretically) sit up and see each other first.

The phrase "Até ao fim do mondo" (until the end of the world) can be found at the foot of Dom Pedro's tomb which includes a carving of the wheel of life. It's not really visible in my picture but at the bottom of the wheel there's an upside down corpse that has this inscription:

Anyway, I'm not the most sentimental person but I found this story irresistibly melodramatic and macabre so I've been thinking about it ever since my trip and a valentine's day show seemed too perfect an opportunity to do a painting about it. The weird little skull cherubs are something I had sketched out a while ago, with references to biblical cherubim in the wings covered with eyes and the confusion with the European putto (I first learned about that reading a Wind in the Door in elementary school haha). I don't paint babies often (or really even LOOK at babies) so they might not be the best haha. A couple photos of it mounted to the wood heart and hanging on the wall:

Here's the info for this show:

Jinxed Philly

1050 North Hancock Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123

Saturday, 2/11. 50 + Artist. This Show is Cash and Carry. No Sunday reception, just a big one on Saturday...

And tonight is the Alice Bag/3Jane/Brillian Colors/Carmen show at the Marvelous. It's gonna be a cool weekend. I'll also be starting some bat show work!

Like A Wet, Red Stain

2012-02-08T08:31:00.000-08:00

Celebrated my birthday with my awesome friends this weekend then spent two days cranking these out for the heart show at Storage Space this friday! 13 mini hand painted wooden heart pins. Super fun to make, not a lot to say about them really haha.

Show info:
Over 50 artists and all art $100 or under!
A Cash/Carry show!
You can't beat it!
*refreshments served opening night Friday February 10th 7pm-midnight

Also open Saturday, Feb 11th and Sunday, Feb 12th 1-4pm

www.theheartshow.org

Up Close

2012-02-03T09:07:00.000-08:00

Just a few close ups of what I'm working on now (and almost done with). For some reason I took on another project to finish by next week so maybe I'll be able to post them up then.

And hey, if you live in NC the benefit show my tiger painting is in is tonight! Check it out!

The Bats Have Left The Bell Tower

2012-01-27T06:58:00.000-08:00

So I figured it was about time to announce some info on the show I'm working on right now. Mike and I decided to do this show late this summer while making plans to go hiking and see one of the largest bat populations in our area leave their roost at dusk in Canoe Creek. We called the park to see if it was too late in the season to see them and were told "Most of our bats are dead. White Nose syndrome. Sorry." This is a population of bats that in 2006 was around 3,000 in a single roost. It's always pretty crushing to hear about extinction on the march but it really hits home when it's so local and affects animals you grew up around and are so accustomed to seeing and wrongly assumed you would always see.

White Nose syndrome is caused by a cold-loving fungus that grows on the faces and bodies of hibernating bats, causing neurological damage and causing them to awaken from hibernation and leave their roost at which point they starve to death. Fungal spores are hard to contain and built to survive and the spread from cave to cave is rapid with fatalities in affected areas around 98% and in some communities 100%. It's estimated to have killed more than 5.7 million bats since just 2006 and to make matters worse, with the slow reproduction rate of bats even if the death stopped NOW it would take at best 200 years for bat populations to return to previous numbers. All of that damage done in just SIX YEARS.

One of the issues that further complicates bat conservation is the general perception of bats reinforced in hollywood:

and the misconception that bats are largely responsible for the spread of rabies. In general the lack of interest in conservation for animals that aren't deemed "cute"(come on, really?) or useful to humans (though bats are VERY useful) or are considered dangerous (one of the issues affecting shark conservation, and issues related to wolves and wild dogs) is indicative of the larger attitude most people have towards animals; the idea that they exist for our use or amusement to be tamed by us or that animals that are threatening to us simply because of the way they exist in nature don't deserve to exist at all. As a result there's a lack of concern for what is a genuine natural eradication happening right under our noses (and not just to bats obviously, I'm talking about the entire natural world here).

I realize that part of the mystique of bats which attracts me to them as a horror movie loving, death rock creep bag is also responsible for some of the struggle involved in conservation and I feel like after a life-time of exploiting and enjoying bat imagery it's time to turn it into something advantageous for bats at a time when they need help the most. The proceeds from the show we're planning will be donated to Bat Conservation International and all the artists participating will be making new work or donating old work related to bats and using bat imagery. So far everyone seems really excited and we're just getting to the stage where we're finalizing a list of participating artists (which so far, is HUGE). We've had two shows like this in Philadelphia so far(For those to Come and From Whence we Came which was organized by Ryann who's helping with this show too), both of which I've participated in and they've both raised a ton of money and probably a good amount of awareness.

The show opening will be on 4/20 (harrrrharrrr) at Grindcore House here in Philadelphia and it'll be up for 2 months. We're working on planning some kind of movie night and also some purchasable items to help raise money. In the meantime I highly suggest checking out this half hour special called "The Race to save Pennsylvania's Bats"

Check out our artist list so far:
Jack Barfield
Vanessa Lucas
Alex McWatt
Jeremy Hush
Avalon Zimmerman
Joe Boruchow
Anthony Pedro
Phil Sloan
Ken Miller
Halsey Swain
Keely Dolan
Jen Zie
Derek Reverts
Ryan Slegel
Adriane Dalton
David Cook
Amanda Moore
Patt Whelan
Dilek Baykara
Alina Josan
Amy Duncan
Alan Brown
Ketch Wehr
Jeff Pfeil
Kathryn Moran
Emily Kohl-Mattingley
Chris Shockley
Doug LaRocca
John Mitchell
Mary Price
Stephanie Dimiskovski
Kristin Scholz
Lucy Price
Jonathan Schoonover
Dylan Smith
Eric Clark
Joseph Hasenauer
Bonsky
Justin Gray
Sarah Grocholski Breitenstein
Alicia Neal
Paul Romano
Elizabeth Siegel
Tamara Waite-Santibanez
Kyle Miller
Greg Kamerdze
Justin Quinlan
Matt DeFillipo
Josh Robeson
Jeanne D'Angelo (duh)
Mike Bukowski
Ryann Casey

Babylonian Gorgon

2012-01-24T07:47:00.000-08:00

Had to take a week break from what I was working on to do a quick flyer for the Alice Bag reading/show which I am so excited about. Alice is a personal hero of mine and since finding out she was maintaining a pretty intense web presence a couple of years ago I've been following her writing and her interview series and finally got her book which I've been reading any time I get a chance. It's a series of short anecdotes about her life so it's really easy to pick up and put down (well, it's a bit hard to put down once you get started) and as it's been said in many reviews it's about much much more than punk. I had to do the flyer quickly (no time for anything but black linework) so I could get it out there since the show is quickly approaching.

Here's the full Northeast Tour info:

2/5 Cambridge MA, Boston Lady Fest, Cambridge YMCA Theater. Alice will be backed up by Terry and Melissa from Foreign Objects
2/6 Easthampton, MA Flywheel Arts Collective 7 pm. Alice will be backed up by Meghan of Ampere/Won't Belong and Ally of Honeysuck, Outdates, and Potty Mouth
2/7 New York NY at Bluestockings Bookstore. Backing by Angie Boylan of Aye Nako and others.
2/8 Batimore MD at Golden West Cafe with War on Women and Big Mouth. 8 pm
2/9 Washington DC at Joint Custody. 7 pm
2/10 Philadelphia PA@The Marvelous w/ Carmen and 3Jane 8 pm
2/11 Providence, RI at Providence Public Library with members of Whore Paint and Lolita Black providing backing 7 pm
2/12 Jamaica Plain, MA at Aviary Gallery. 8 pm with backing by Terry and Melissa from Foreign Objects and DJ Danny Gromfin Spinning LA punk classics before and after the reading!

Yesterday despite the fact that I'm pretty sick right now I managed to put in some time with the painting I posted linework for last week. This is going to be a fun one to paint!

SOPA/ PIPA F.U.

2012-01-18T08:56:00.000-08:00

Hey, since I'm too dumb to get the SOPA strike page up in my html, I'll post this video explaining what SOPA/PIPA would do. And what you can do. And I'll just say being in the age group that grew up without the internet and remembering desperately wanting access to radical ideas and underground music and art and my friends and I scrambling to find and share those things amongst ourselves I can recognize how many more people can find those things now and how vital and amazing that is, and why it's worth protecting. I think sometimes even I take it for granted and it's good to reflect on the past in a way that's a little less nostalgic. The reason we thought zines were important then is the reason sharing on the internet unfettered by corporate intervention and censorship is now.

The Dead Queen

2012-01-10T07:59:00.000-08:00

So, I finished a couple of things in December but they were all presents. One was a painted recipe box for my mother which actually came out better than I thought it would but someone accidentally erased all of my pictures so I can't show you that.

Every year for Christmas my brother gives me a gift card to the place where I buy paint. I used to use them because they carried the Pelican Plaka paint I like but they seem to be phasing it out. Luckily their general selection is pretty great and I make an order every January to restock things I've used up or to try new stuff. In order to really get a grip on what I needed I looked through everything I had to see what colors were lacking and to throw out stuff that was too dried out to use.

I find that really pleasing to look at.

I ended up buying a few metallics (seems like I buy a new gold every year) and some new white and black to test out, as well as a new ceramic palette to hopefully curb my compulsion to mix paint on any surface I can find (note all the jar tops in the picture). Exciting, I know. On a slightly related note, how cool are impossible colors?!

I got to do another art trade which I love. I traded the urn painting I did for this amazing hand of glory necklace (top) from Amanda Moore aka Adelina Mictlan:

The original hand drawing was also by my buddy Patt Whelan aka Patt Attack.

I had my eye on this thing for so long since I love anything related to the hand of glory and I love big weird jewelry. Amanda's stuff is really well done with a nice heavy style and she uses a lot of interesting etching methods to make the more graphic pieces. I've also got one of these finger pendants coming my way as part of the trade and we're chatting about some kind of collaboration AND she'll be making some small bat pendants for the bat show. Neat!

This weekend I finally got to work on a new painting for a Feb. group show and got everything drawn, inked, and ready to paint. The pencils:
and inked:

Also working on my piece for the bat show. I'll say it involves a secular icon, bones and an attempt to cast faux rock crystal pieces in resin for the frame. Excited to get to work and plan the show a bit more.

We, The Bones That Are Here, Await Yours

2011-12-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

I got back from Portugal over a week ago. It was ten days of looking and walking and looking and walking. I paid for the trip with most of the money I made from art this year, and saw tons of things that will probably make their way back into art I do this year, making the whole endeavor somewhat self sustaining. It was hard to pick pictures to post here because we took HUNDREDS but here are some of my favorites.

One of my favorite things we did was a little day trip to Sintra from Lisbon. It's only a couple dollars on a train and the town has castles and huge gardens and public parks. We saw the Castle of the Moors ruins there and Pena Palace:
The best part of the day in Sintra was Quinta da Regaleira a huge house with expansive gardens built by an opera set designer, full of hidden alchemical symbols and experiences.

There are pitch black grottoes and catacombs underground the whole garden which you can wander through to come out of various wells with long twisted stairs leading up to the light:
We wandered around here for hours and it was great. The house itself is even aligned according to alchemical and astrological principles.

Portugal also has a lot of ossuaries. A LOT. We saw 5 but there are many more.

The first picture is of the Capela dos Ossos in Evora, probably the biggest one we saw, with painted ceilings covered in symbols and two mummies mysteriously hanging on a wall. The second is in Faro and was eerily situated mere feet from a daycare center where children screamed and ran around the completely silent outdoor chapel. Some are indoors, in churches or crypts and some are little outdoor chapels in tiny rural villages we had to hike several miles to.
In each of them we were alone or virtually alone and in one we actually found a skull cap just laying on the ground. While I'm talking about ossuaries I should mention this excellent book I got for Mike that contains pictures, information and insight into the culture of ossuaries:
There was also a lot of impressive religious art. I'm always really torn by my admiration for this stuff since it's funded by and an outward sign of the immense wealth of the Catholic church. It was made in a time when the most ambitious art was made for religious purposes so it's some of the most over the top, gilded, time consuming, intricate and monumental stuff you'll see in Europe and I can't help but be drawn to it. Also it's incredibly creepy.

From the Templar knight monastery in Tomar where made a bunch of stupid Tombs of the Blind Dead jokes to each other while we ran around unattended.

Stained glass in a church in....Evora? Maybe Lisbon.

Witchy window in the Acobaca Monastery.

We also saw tons of reliquaries but were denied access to the insanely creepy reliquary alters at São Roque because they were practicing for some sort of Christmas event but I managed to get a picture from pretty far away:

Who is creepier than Catholics? No one! Not even me.

I also spent a lot of time creeping around the cemetery in Evora. There were a lot of really interesting monuments with symbols I hadn't seen before in the US and a lot of family tombs with glass doors so you could see several generations of coffins.
Finally, I saw what is now the probably the oldest man made thing I've ever seen (older than newgrange), the Neolithic standing stone grouping of the Almendres Cromlech:

The best guess is that this functioned as a huge community solar calender with the sun rising over the center stone at the equinox. It's situated in the middle of a cork orchard and we got to see it on a misty atmospheric morning. There's also a huge dolmen not far away in a pretty tragic state of disrepair which was still fun to see. The cap stone had been BLOWN OFF WITH DYNAMITE during the excavation so you could actually stand above and look directly in.

I don't have pictures from it but we also caught an exhibition called Aljube a Voz das Vitimas: The Voice of the Victims. Staged at Lisbon's old jail the exhibition was about victims of Salazar's military dictatorship under the New State and the role of the PVDE (later the PIDE) in the surveillance, torture, imprisonment and murder of Portuguese activists and citizens. They did a great job of highlighting both the victims and their experiences and consistently naming and displaying photographs of the perpetrators to make a public record of who was responsible. They also list companies who collaborated with the secret police and spied on and reported their employees and unsurprisingly there were several american car manufacturers on the list. Anyway, really good exhibit we basically stumbled across.

I haven't been super productive this month because of the trip and the holidays but I have a few things to post around the new year hopefully if I'm not too lazy.

Domingos Zine

2011-12-10T04:22:00.000-08:00

Posting from a hostel in Portugal since I forgot to post this before I left. I sent something along to Sundays zine and just got a couple copies in the mail (wet, envelope torn open, thanks USPS). I didn't have time to make something new and figured my goofy old S.T. fan art (with some details changed and touched up) was fitting for a skate/art zine. I sort of wish I had time to make something a little more intense because I'm nestled in among some really cool artists here.

Best of all the whole back side is this beautiful painting by Tamara:

I just have to say this is a really good idea for a zine! Newsprint is cheap and easy, it folds down so no assembly. Free art! If you're trying to find a copy I'm pretty sure you need to be in NY in a coffee or skate shop, but those are all really great places to be anyway so get on it. It should also be available to look at online.

Like I mentioned, I´m in Portugal. It´s great. Two days in and I´ve already seen so many castles and mummies and Roman relics and a church destroyed by an earthquake (the best kind). I´m pretty sick but I´m uh...walking it off. Next few days- more castles, ossuaries, standing stones and Roman ruins.

The computer here has the spell check set to Portuguese and I´m a pretty uselss speller without it so I´ll shut up before I type anything really stupid.

Standing On The Frozen Floor

2011-12-02T06:21:00.001-08:00

Mike Brennan and I printed the pre-order insert posters for the Des Ark record and everything went so smoothly thanks to the folks at Reclaim who burned perfect screens for us. We only had a few hours in the space after work so having the screens burned ahead of time meant we could just get right to work printing.
We also printed the limited glow in the dark ones (top). They're black and teal glow ink on tan paper (with a couple on the orange and blue as well). Glow in the dark is a gimmick I never grow tired of, and we included the skull in the glowing screen so with the lights out you get a floating skull and the smoke. It was really fun working on a project with another person since pretty much all the art I do is so solitary, and I haven't printed in a long time so that was fun (even though my back is killing me now).

I also saw the printed lp covers for the first time and they came out great.
I was worried that the smoke effect wouldn't work, but it came out exactly the way I wanted it to. When you tilt the record into the light it becomes more or less visible and opaque which is neat.
It was great being included in this whole process because sometimes you hand artwork off to someone and it comes back to you printed terribly, with weird colors, or disrespectfully cropped and chopped up but we all had input into the final presentation of this which is great. I redid the smoke lettering when I found out this would be the cover and we laid it out to be wider and stretch across the fold.

I also popped that tiger painting in a frame last night.
The funny thing is that this used to be a bright red frame with an astonishingly well matted picture of Santa in it. It's come a long way since I bought it for a couple bucks at a flea market. I also wanted to grab a photo of the back of it since pretty much no one except people who own paintings I've done get to see those:

Totally unnecessary but I like the backs to look fancy.

I might be a little slow posting for the rest of the year because I'll be out of the country for a week but I'll probably have some sketches and my end of the year mix soon!

Shiny Diamonds, Like The Eyes Of A Cat

2011-11-29T06:34:00.000-08:00

I finally finished something! I feel like this was a little more drawn out than it needed to be, probably because of an irregular work schedule (at my day job). Anyway, my friend Hannah, who is probably the most tireless advocate for animal rights (among other things) that I know, works at Carolina Tiger Rescue and is organizing an art show to benefit the organization. What they do is awesome. Their mission statement:

Vision

Carolina Tiger Rescue is working toward the day when:

wildcats are not owned by individuals as pets
wildcats are not used for entertainment purposes
no trade exists for wildcats or their parts
all wildcats prosper in sustainable, native habitats

Purpose

To achieve our mission, Carolina Tiger Rescue:

rescues wildcats
provides lifelong sanctuary for wildcats
educates the public about the plight of wildcats in captivity and in the wild
conducts non-invasive research to further understand and aid wildcats
advocates for action to maintain wildcats in sustainable native habitats, or when that is not a viable option, for the respectful, humane treatment of them in captivity.

How can you not get behind that? Why not make a donation? I set out to make a new painting themed to the event (though it wasn't a requirement) and made this:
I read a little blurb about tigers regarded as part of the Chthonic world because of their ability to see in the dark (in some related reading I saw some of the same associations made with bats and the night because of their night vision) so I decided to do a painting about that. The underworld for the Greeks and Romans was associated with wealth since below the ground is where both mineral wealth was mined and natural wealth (crops!) sprang from. So chthonic deities were associated with wealth and bounty not just death (though the underworld was full of spooky shades). Dis Pater was an early Roman god whose name translated to "wealthy father".

(the one on the right looks like the Crimson Ghost!)

Anywayyyyyyy this was really fun and somewhat challenging to paint especially since it's fairly small and I wanted to tiger to have a lot of hair detailI also realized it's pretty hard to paint crystals without them turning into an accidental Lisa Frank color explosion, but I think I managed to reign it in.

On a slightly related note, I love when I suddenly find out that there's a term for something I think is interesting. I stumbled across this the other night in a wikihole:
"Interpretatio graeca is a Latin term for the common tendency of ancient Greek writers to equate foreign divinities to members of their own pantheon. Herodotus, for example, refers to the ancient Egyptian gods Amon, Osiris and Ptah as "Zeus", "Dionysus" and "Hephaestus" , respectively."

There is also "Interpretatio Romana" which refers to the Romans doing the same thing. Neat!

Tomorrow I'll be printing the insert posters for that Des Ark record, so maybe I'll have some photo updates soon.

In What Distant Deeps Or Skies

2011-11-17T07:21:00.000-08:00

Started work on a new painting this week. Just got to the inking stage last night but here are the pencils. I'm pretty pleased with how this is coming out but I maaaaaay have made a lot of work for myself because the background is almost as involved as the foreground and will probably take a long time to finish.

Also in the planning stages of a big group show to benefit Bat Conservation International. I've never organized a show before but I'm pretty excited about it. It's a cause I care about a lot and we've been able to ask a lot of artists whose work I love and the response has been really positive so I'm anticipating some really great pieces. There will doubtless be more updates in the coming months (the show isn't until April).

Side note; I was talking to a woman at The Autumn Spell opening who when I told her that I painted my work asked incredulously "with paint?" and then said she assumed I meant it was digitally "painted". I've seen a lot of artists who work digitally refer to pieces as "paintings" presumably because they're using Illustrator or Photoshop brushes and it irks me for some reason. My thought is if you didn't use actual paint to make it, if you haven't ruined all of your pants and t-shirts and shoes and if you don't somehow have paint in your hair and under your nails, if you've never held an actual brush you're not making a painting. Call it a digital painting if you must.

Final note; Buy Some Damn Art is featuring original paintings by my buddy Alan right now and you should buy some of his damn art.

Señora De Las Sombras

2011-11-02T08:58:00.000-07:00

So I finally finished the Narcocorrido poster on almost two weeks ago and I've just been too lazy to finish this blog entry for some reason. Might have been a little Halloween distracted as well...
The painting is pretty large so I didn't get a chance to scan it and all I have for now are these kind of crappy photos. At least you can make out the design though:
Yeah...not a good photo. Anyway, Ryan Prows who is the director of this short film, contacted me months and months ago about doing this poster and after a lot of back and forth we got a good solid idea about what the poster should include. Here's a synopsis of the film from Ryan's site:

The narcocorrido, a drug ballad in the Mexican folk-music tradition, mythicizes seedy border tales of the modern west: drug lords, human trafficking, arrests, betrayals, shootouts and murder. Naija Dillion is a Yuma county Sheriff’s deputy, an outsider and minority in her own community. Gravely ill, and disillusioned in the wake of the new Arizona racial profiling law, Naija robs a drug cartel shipment of contraband in a last-ditch scramble for personal survival.

With blood and fire loosed in the territory, Naija finds herself caught up in a narcocorrido made real. Can she recognize her shared desperation with the traffickers, men with families in danger if they don’t succeed in their delivery? Or will she suppress her humanity to achieve her own wellbeing?

Ryan wanted to integrate some Santa Muerte imagery since the cult is popular in the world of drug trafficking (though it's not at all exclusive to that and is very popular). It's an interesting intersection of what some believe to be pre christian death cult ideas and Catholic Saint worship. I like how it's a cult born from a need, where people on the margins of society saw something lacking in Catholicism and created a figure that served their spiritual needs. The Catholic church in Mexico does not acknowledge the saint or the practice and considers it a form of "devil-worship" but that doesn't have any affect on the popularity of the cult and many people consider themselves devout Catholics but still worship Santa Muerte along with the other saints.
The painting is based off of the statues of the figures which are usually dressed in satin and lace dresses and decorated with beads and jewelry and little figures on the necklace are milagros. I thought the saint and milagro imagery were appropriate for a film with two characters whose lives are desperate and in need of intervention.

This project presented me with a real challenge since Ryan really wanted the two main characters to be on the poster. It's been years since I did any real portrait work and when I did it was always in much more forgiving mediums like oil paints and charcoals. Oddly I hated the drawing of Naija but thought it came out better when painted and had the opposite experience with the portrait of the male character, Hector, that I thought looked much better in the drawing stage:

It doesn't help that both actors look attractive and happy in all their publicity photos but totally hard in the movie, so I didn't have a lot of reference to work with. I would say I did a serviceable job and that the style they're done in fits pretty well with the hand painted style of the rest.

I don't know, there's a lot of symbolism here and I'm feeling more than a little lazy about spelling it all out so hopefully it comes through and the poster works!

Halloween was good but I've been sick so I laid low on the actual day and like last year carved a few samhnag (three turnips and two acorn squash), drank hot cider in my cold backyard and watched them glow for a while.
I also whipped together a pretty good Psychomania costume for a couple parties:
There was a Halloween opening for the Autumn Spell show I'm in and there will be another this Friday for First Friday. Check it out!!

Salt The Dead, You Close The Veil

2011-10-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

Just a relatively quick post, I have another one set to post tomorrow as well. I finished this flyer on Monday:
This will be the release show for the Des Ark record I did the insert poster for months and months ago. Aimée from Des Ark liked the poster so she opted to make it the cover instead and they're currently at the printer so they'll be available for this show. We're planning on screen printing some limited run posters in addition to the poster inserts that will still be included in the pre-order. Really cool!
I decided to do something inspired by all the reading I've been doing about oracles which is why she's holding the scrying bowl with the divination pendulum necklace:

We are, after all, coming up on Samhain, the ideal time for divination!

My friend Kev asked me to make the flyer and since the show is also a joint Scorpio birthday show I included the scorpion and the constellation traced out in the sky for him:
This flyer was also my first attempt at painting in grey scale. This is something I've been wanting to try out for a while since I've been toying with the idea of working on an art zine and I wanted to have some work that could be cheaply reproduced with a photocopier for the insides. I miss color, but I also really like black and white images and it was fun to be making one again.

In other news I got invited last minute to be in this Autumn/Halloween themed show that Paul Romano is curating:
Tons of cool artists and my favorite theme. Unfortunately there was no way I could make a new piece but I decided to show the forest demon painting I made since it has yet to be shown and fits the theme pretty well. I even went to the trouble of framing it with a mat (and a 6 dollar flea market frame):
We're coming up on my absolute favorite time of the year and I'm hoping to be able to spend the rest of this week working on costumes and carving and creeping around. I actually managed to get up to NH last week to go to the Haunted Overload attraction which was really really incredible to look at. We went on a thursday when there are no actors and you can just wander in the woods in the dark and look at all the incredible stuff they built. We also stopped by the Witch's Dungeon for a return visit. The Witch's Dungeon is an awesome heartfelt display of life size classic movie monster sculptures in a "museum" that has been in the artists backyard since he was 15 (in the 60's) and includes voice recordings made just for him by Vincent Price. I recommend it!

I'll conclude with possibly my favorite picture ever, me and my grandmother on Hallowe'en in 1985 or so:
Expect a post about the full poster for Narcocorrido tomorrow!

Holy Death

2011-10-11T06:52:00.000-07:00

Making really good progress on this poster even with a busy week and weekend. I had taken some progress photos to explain my rendering process but lost them on a buggy memory card. Not sure it would be terribly interesting to anyone else anyway. I'm basically figuring out everything as I go and I've kind of started to hit my stride in the past year, working with the paint I like and teaching myself techniques which makes big projects like this go a lot faster and smoother than they would have a year ago. blah blah blah.

Not much else to report. I'm actually reading two books at the moment, Ancient Oracles: Making the Gods Speak and Mystery Cults of the Ancient World. Both are fairly readable to someone who isn't super familiar with Classical studies but they both make a lot of references that are better understood if you are at least a little familiar.

The truth about Mystery Cults is that they are very very very appropriately named, and the academic conclusion is more or less that there is none. The book even outlines a cult in which the actual participants didn't know what god they were worshiping. So despite being halfway through the book I have to assume that it wont be revealing any mysteries, but what little definitive information there is is pretty fascinating. I bought another book called Finding Persephone which I haven't started yet, which focuses on the role of women in ancient religion and cults, something I read a really good essay about years and years ago that I've been wanting to follow up on with more reading.

The oracle book has been pretty great so far and I'm currently sketching a flier for a show that will make use of some of the things I've been reading about. The book does a really good job of touching on the psychological appeal of prognostication, especially in a culture (Greek) that believed so firmly in irreversible fate. So far I've only read about Greece but the book does touch on oracles in Asia and various shamanistic practices and will eventually discuss Rome as well. I've been thinking over some ideas for a new series of paintings and one of the ideas was to do a series on divination so I'm taking a lot of mental notes as I read.

Sequenti Die Aurora Apparente, Altis Vocibus Baphometh Invocaverunt

2011-09-28T06:23:00.000-07:00

It's been too long, and I've admittedly not been working as hard or as quickly as a should be. But I'm about to really buckle down to try to finish a big (literally large) project so that I can have a good chunk of October to myself for Halloween things (turnip and pumpkin carving, costume and mask making, visiting creepy attractions).

So the thing I'm working on right now is actually a movie poster for someone's AFI student thesis film. It's a short film called Narcocorrido and the director came to me interested in using Santa Muerte imagery for the poster and since that's something I'm interested in I said yes. The process of designing and drawing this has been longer than my usual personal process since it involves a lot of back and forth and I'm still working on the final drawing which is large and involved but here's a little chunk of it:
I'm hoping to have this inked and to start painting it by this weekend since there's a lot of detail and the piece is so big. I'll probably have more insight on this later but it's always strange for me to work with Catholic imagery, having been raised Catholic and probably having the most ingrained understanding of this particular kind of symbolism and yet having no actual personal connection to it (as well as a great deal of disdain for the Catholic church). I kind of want to work with it more since I don't think it's any less strange or interesting than any other belief system (and in many cases the symbolism and practice is adapted from earlier pagan tradition) and leaving it out only serves to support the idea that Western Christianity is somehow a religious standard against which everything else is deemed "exotic", strange or superstitious. I also admittedly love Medieval art which is pretty much ALL religious because it's grim and gory in a disarmingly ornate and colorful way.

I also finished the thing I was working on for my trade with david cook. Probably the things I get the most feedback from are the series of upside down crosses I did last summer (I don't flatter myself, I know it's the shape) and he was interested in them so I broke out the unused crosses I still had around and made another. While the other ones were more a play on inverted icons and malevolent spirits this one was just me inventing a summoned demon because I was reading the Grimorium Verum at the time.
I reused some things that worked well in the previous pieces (the horns and clouds) since it's such a difficult shape to work with. Like I mentioned before I like weird and colorful demons in medieval art so I stuck with that, and added the little flame of enlightenment from the Sabbatic Goat.

I finished that book Raising Hell: a Concise History of the Black Arts- and Those Who Dared To Practice Them which referenced the Grimorium Verum a lot. I remembered I had a copy I hadn't read yet and plowed through it. Necromancy and the summoning of demons is strange because the whole thing is so utterly Christian and relies on a belief in god to control "dark forces" despite how "satanic" it's generally believed to be probably because it was outlawed by the church. Most of the motivations are pretty hilariously earthly. A lot of them deal with finding money, controlling women (f.u. wizard), telling the future, traveling swiftly etc. Related to the Grimorium Verum, I bought this book Grimoires: A History of Magic Books a while ago and haven't read very far into it yet but the actual history of these books is pretty fascinating and full of intrigue, hoaxes and weirdness.

Back to trading, if you haven't seen David's work you should. It's intricate colorful, weird (mildly pornographic), and entirely hand done:
I also recently went to NY to meet up with Tamara and we did a trade and I got to walk away with this:
which I've had my eye on for a while now. Tamara is a super talented (printer, painter and tattoo artist) and extremely motivated lady and it was awesome getting to sit around drinking coffee and talking about art and hard work with her! Check out her stuff!

Anyway, if you live in Philly and you see me wandering the streets in the next few weeks yukking it up and chugging coffee smack me in the head and remind me to get back to work already. 32 Days 'til Halloween!

Who Is In Dust Awakens

2011-09-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty absent from posting because I'm at a really weird point now. In the planning stages of a commission bouncing sketches back and forth with not much to show anyone else yet. I'm admittedly pretty impatient and not much of a planner, and my process is usually "got an idea, draw it out, paint it" but when you're working in a medium as impossible to change or edit as gouache and casein paint are, it's pretty integral to get everything straight before you get started on something for someone else.

Because not having anything to work on makes me anxious and finishing projects, even small ones is something I find weirdly reassuring I started the drawing for a trade I'm doing. It'll be another one of those wooden crosses, inspired by a lot of the demonology stuff I've been reading. More on that later.
I should have a final drawing for the commission I'm working on, info about what it is and a bunch of rambling about demonology and all the new books I bought about oracles and Greek mystery cults coming up. Blah blah blah.

This post is boring, maybe read this instead?

You Sealed Your Doom, Your Time Has Come

2011-09-01T06:15:00.000-07:00

Spent a little longer than I thought I'd have to (always the case) on this t-shirt design due to "Hurricane" complications. Some shitty (very old) wiring fried when water got in our basement and we thought we were about to have an electrical fire so our power was out for a while. It's worth noting that the two things I opted to save in the event of a potential emergency were my cat and a portfolio of paintings, including this one:
I get pretty stuck for tshirt design ideas, because they're more design oriented and less narrative and a lot of the ideas I have stored away work better for full paintings. This shirt started with some gates I saw and photographed at Edgecomb Cemetery in Maine:
I added some touches to the original urn:
Draped urns are pretty common in Victorian Cemetery iconography, with the urn representing the body and the veil representing the "veil" separating the world of the living from the world of the dead. Oddly enough, Cremation was very rare in Victorian times, but the cremation urn was a popular symbol of the corporeal world anyway.

The Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet and is often used to represent simply "the end" or the end of time or of life. You'll also see it along with the alpha (the beginning) in christian churches fairly often. A Theta would also have been appropriate and I thought about working both of them in but thought it was overkill.

It should be pretty clear by this point that I really like doing mist and smoke and ghost hands, because I've worked them into most things I've done for the past year. It's just really fun to paint and I think it adds some dimension.
If you're interested in exploring cemeteries and making sense of the symbolism there (and there's tons of it) this book is really great:
It's organized by symbol type (animals, plants, religious, figural, secret societies) , full of images from all over the world, and conveniently small so you could feasibly bring it out to a cemetery with you. AND you can order it from the Laurel Hill gift shop and in doing so support one of my favorite Philadelphia historical landmarks.

About to buckle down and work on a movie poster design and in the early stages of planning a curated show with some friends. More on that later....

Waiting At The End Of Time

2011-08-23T05:28:00.000-07:00

Linework for a T-shirt in progress! Already about 1/3 painted.

Salem's Lot

2011-08-18T04:37:00.000-07:00

Back from my little trip to Maine with Mike to visit my grandfather. 5 full days away and I hiked 5 State Parks/Preserves I'd never been to and saw 5 cemeteries I hadn't seen before. New England Cemeteries are some of my favorite and they're everywhere on the side of the road, most of them extremely old with some amazing iconography and atmosphere. Anyone who's every traveled with me anywhere knows that I can spend hours pouring over every stone in a cemetery and taking hundreds of photos (so annoying). Here's just a couple:

I have also been taking hundreds of photos of weird mushrooms and fungus, and we see tons in Maine because the damp rotting leaves on the forest floors are a perfect breeding ground. A few of those:

I was very excited to find a "blue staining" mushroom (I think a Bolete?). When you break or cut these mushrooms you can actually watch them turn blue as they hit the air. I took a video. If you're interested in literally HUNDREDS of photos of mushrooms, fungus, frogs and cemeteries you can see the whole set here.

We also had a night of fireworks over Pemaquid Beach! Most years I miss them:
We also got a chance to stop at the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, which was great. I got to meet this Bigfoot:
The museum also happens to be located in the back of a really awesome used book store called Green Hand Books. They had a great selection of horror, sci fi and occult books so naturally I couldn't pass through without buying some.
I'm already halfway though Raising Hell: a Concise History of the Black Arts- and Those Who Dared To Practice Them by Robert Masello. It's really well organized and full of entertaining and creepy factoids about necromancy and divination and conjuring demons that no doubt will make their way into a painting sometime soon. It's also refreshing to read something written after the early 1900's because there's a little more interpretation and some sarcastic humor that makes it a bit more readable.

I read bits here and there from The Story of Superstition by Philip F. Waterman. It's a neat old book, with a lot of cool stuff that's pertinent to a project I've been planning about the evil eye. It's a bit disorganized and lacks focus (wandering randomly from topic to topic) but will definitely be useful to have.

The last book Spirit Summonings is from the Time Life series Mysteries of the Unknown. These books look a little corny but you can find them everywhere, they're cheap and really image heavy and actually have a lot of good information. I got it because I'm working on a shirt design right now that will probably use some victorian funerary iconography/ spiritualism stuff. The book has some nice original illustrations of seances, some awesome photographs, and a lot of information about a few cases I hadn't heard of. It also has some hilarious photos of modern mediums channeling that really just amount to a series of people in windbreakers (the book is from 1989) making hilarious faces.

I didn't draw at all while I was away so I have a LOT of work to do.

A Rown-Tree, Witch!

2011-08-09T05:20:00.000-07:00

I finally finished that big piece last week! It took an unusually long time because of the size and the amount of detail I put into the background and because I was making a point to be a little more thoughtful about planning and color selection. I was offered an opportunity to have some of my prints produced and up for sale on a site and I wanted to make something really over the top and brand new (exclusive! whatever...)

Anyway, here it is (ignore the light leak on the right side and definitely click to see it larger):
I was doing some sketching when I started this but couldn't land on an idea I was really excited about. I keep a little list of ideas, images and stories I think could turn into an illustration someday and I revisit it every so often to see if any of those ideas are appropriate for whatever project I'm working on. I had made a note to myself about how interesting this image was:
I found it in the "Mysteries of the Unknown: Witches and Witchcraft" with the caption:
"Satan directs his minions from a hollow tree in this 1591 woodcut of the North Berwick witches." I made a note of the fact that the devil was emerging from a hollow tree because it seemed unique to me and reminded me of some of the reading I did about forest demons while doing research for the Unclean Spirits show. Forest demons and tree spirits seem very common in the folklore of cultures all over the world. In reading you'll also see the association of forests and specific trees with the devil and witches as habitation and ritual sites, presumably a connection made during the rise of Christianity when all the trappings of the previous pagan religions were relegated to the supernatural and demonic world.

A lot of the Slavic folklore I read referred to spirits like the Leshii who interferes with humans in defense of the forest. Across many many cultures there are spirits that live in the trees themselves and live or die depending on the state of the tree, or will brutally avenge any harm done to it. German folklore seems particularly full of scary forest demons like the Bockmann and the Baumese as well as the Wild Hunstman. I like the idea of these spirits of place which have a sort of shared consciousness and are intimidating because...well forests are intimidating and were even more so when people couldn't hear the highway from them.

It's dark in there!

The Forest in Folklore and Mythology by Alexander Porteous which I mentioned in a previous post is seriously full of so much relevant information that I'm having a lot of trouble summarizing it here for the purpose of this post. If you're interested in stuff like this you should probably just read it. Like a lot of folklore texts from the time it doesn't have a ton of insight and is more a collection of information, but it's a little smoother to read than a lot of the others I have and makes more connections than some of the ones that just read like lists of facts.

I think I drew the demon with european medieval images of demons in mind because I've always liked how bizarre and colorful they are. Here's a picture I took of a painting of one in the Cloisters in New York:

Dog legs? Face crotch?

I also wanted to give a nod to the aesthetic of the Sabbatic Goat and the Horned God without it looking directly like either of them and wanted it to be a composite of all the kinds of wildlife in a forest.

Anyway, if all goes as planned this piece along with a few others and another new design will be available to purchase through Shirts and Destroy in a few months. This is happy news because they are awesome and their products come out great and because I am fully aware that trying to deal with printing and selling prints on a person by person basis through email has been totally absurd and irritating for everyone involved. Up to this point I've really failed at making the things I make available for purchase online but hopefully that will change very soon!

In the course of working on this really labor intensive piece Mike and I watched countless movies and got particularly hung up on horror movie documentaries. Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape was particularly good (and long!). We also picked through youtube and found the Fangoria produced "Scream Greats" series. Here's a link to the special on Tom Savini (Pittsburgh friends, I think this is the one that includes a lot of footage of him walking around Bloomfield) and one to a special about Witchcraft and Satanism (Wiccans with astounding NY/NJ accents). I also watched some old Satanic Panic videos. This British one "In Satan's Name" is particularly comprehensive (tons of "recovered memory" weirdness, also an interview with Boyd Rice if you're into that) and if you're into pointy eyebrowed Satanist hilarity (Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon!) please do watch Satanis: The Devil's Mass.

Leaving for Maine in the middle of the night tonight for a week of lurking in the fog by the ocean, taking hikes on the mushroom covered trails near my grandfather's house and sketching and hanging out and most importantly getting the fuck out of the garbage strewn sweltering pit that is South Philadelphia in August. See ya.

Creeping Things That Run In Hedge Bottoms

2011-07-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

Still slow updating because the painting I'm working on now is probably the most complicated one I've done yet. I will admit I have also been tempted out of the house by canoe trips in the Pine Barrens and very important pool opportunities but mostly I've had my head down painting and watching tons of horror movie documentaries and endless episodes of Home Movies. There are lots of tiny details (creatures, trees, fur, scales etc), but it should be finished by the end of this weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to find a place to get something this size scanned, then I'll talk about what it is and what it's for. Here are a few bits and pieces I photographed pretttttty poorly last night:

Also, the "From Whence We Came" Group show is coming down next week with a closing event August 6th from 4-6. There's still lots of cool art left (mine sold though) and Ryann is really close to her donation goal so if you live in the area and haven't stopped by yet go for it. I have a picture of my piece framed for once:
That's a 50 cent flea market frame! Cutting the plexi for it was a brutal nightmare!

Back to painting and willing Fall to come sooner.

The Eye From Outer Space

2011-07-14T06:54:00.000-07:00

Just a few quick things. So I was having an unusually hard time settling on an idea for a big project that last couple weeks. It's never that I don't have ideas, it's more that I'm not certain if they're the right ones, or I can't quite figure out how I want to draw them. I got really antsy and listless and frustrated and pretty much the only cure for that is forcing myself to make something little. So I made this weird Orphic Egg:

I have a habit of picking up weird cheap wooden stuff from craft stores (that's where all those crosses came from) and got the idea for this around easter time when they had all those little wooden eggs out. The Orphic (or Cosmic) egg is part of the iconography related to the Orphic Mystery Cult. I've been trying to find some good essays on Greek and Roman mystery cults lately, after having read a lot about them in college, but so far no luck. I visited the Walters Museum in Baltimore a couple months ago for their exhibit on reliquaries and noticed they have a whole display of artifacts related to mystery cults (primarily Mithras, I think) which I don't think I've seen in a museum before. Really neat!

I finally stopped freaking myself out and started an intense drawing for a pretty involved painting. I'm not really going to talk about what it's for for a little while, but I'll be posting bits and pieces in the next month. I'm already almost done inking it, but here's a corner of the pencils:
I started the project with a sort of vague concept culled from a lot of random reading but I've since started "The Forest in Folklore and Mythology" by Alexander Porteous and I've learned a lot of neat relevant stuff from it.

Fiiiiinnnnnallly I wanted to talk about my friend Alan and the awesome piece of his that I bought from the "From Whence We Came" show I was just in. He's an amazing artist and really humble cool guy, who paints tiny intricate colorful monsters like this:
I bought a comic book he hand drew and painted and bound for the show and i'm really stoked!
You can check out his website here and buy prints here!

In other news it's 8,000 degrees in Philadelphia and I want to die.

Vampire Squid From Hell

2011-07-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

I've been really long between updates lately. Taking care of a personal stuff but also waiting for good photos and scans is always an issue. Here's a full photo (getting a scan made didn't work out) of my piece for the "From Whence We Came" group show to benefit Oceana and Sea Sheperd:
This guy is a Vampire Squid, latin name Vampyroteuthis Infernalis ("vampire squid from hell"). It's not actually a true squid but rather an living fossil, the last of its own order which shares traits of both squid and octopuses.
The two filaments that you see hanging from the underside of the squid are one of the things unique to this particular order and are used for sensing prey. Unlike most animals that have the "vampire" moniker these squid don't drink blood but are rather named because of the black underside webbing between their tentacles that they flip up over their bodies like a cloak to hide in the dark water from both prey and predators.

bleh.

Like many deep sea animals they are covered with photophores and capable of producing light displays and expressing bio-luminescent particles to confuse predators and using their glow to mask their silhouette from prey looking up from the deep sea towards the muted surface light. My original plan for this show was to do some embroideries of deep sea animals glowing using this glow in the dark embroidery floss I got, but I didn't trust my speed with embroidery so I opted to do a painting instead and tracked down some strong glow in the dark paint that glowed the actual blue color that the squid does:

Because they're so seldom seen I got my reference for how they look in action from a couple really amazing videos I highly suggest you watch, because watching how all of these features work in practice is pretty great, especially the light organs on the top of the head which can be constricted to imitate eyes moving away in the dark.

One of the things I really like about this and other deep sea creatures is the fact that the features that make it look scary or threatening are mostly there for defensive purposes in an inhospitable and dark environment. I could have done another piece about ocean folklore but sometimes natural things are way weirder and scarier and more interesting than anything humans create or embellish.

Going to help hang the show tonight! Check it out Friday if you're in the area.

From Whence We Came

2011-06-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

So in 2009 my friend Josh organized a bird themed show called "For Those to Come" to benefit the Bird Conservancy, and I contributed a few pieces. This year my friend Ryann decided to do the same thing but with the ocean as the theme and beneficiary. I recently finished my piece for the show, a portrait of a vampire squid, but I have to go get it scanned so for the time being I thought I'd put up a few in progress (pre-outlining) photos and the copy and info for the show, in case anyone is interested in attending. I'll post a finished scan and give some more info on this monster next week.

"The various issues plaguing our world’s oceans are neither simple nor easy to address. Contamination of water sources, destruction of habitat and the consistent (often brutal) depletion of the world’s marine organisms has led to what many experts have suggested is a global epidemic; a crisis that scientists believe could be irreversible in the next twenty years. In fact, the delicate balance that controls the ocean is being tipped by our own hands and it is only by our intervention that we can begin to save the quality and quantity of life living in the open seas. Protecting the world’s marine ecosystems isn’t a political or geographic problem, at best, it should be a global call to action but it can start right here in Philadelphia.

This July, over 40 artists have donated their time and work to ocean conservation. "From Whence We Came" features art from multiple mediums and from artists throughout the US, each piece expressing the artists own interpretation of the ocean and water-related themes. All proceeds from the show will be donated to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society & Oceana, two charities committed to protecting and preserving the world’s oceans. Come see the show, buy some art and know that your involvement will make a difference."

The artist list includes:
Zach Baez, Bonsky, Alan Brown, Michael Bukowski, Ryann Casey, Tracey Cocco, Alex Curtis, Adriane Dalton, Jeanne D'Angelo, Matt DiFilippo, Stephanie Dimiskovski, Melissa Farley, Craig Fineburg, Keegan Fink, Justin Gray, Sarah Grocholski-Breitenstein, Eleanor Grosch, Joseph Hasenauer, Katie Henry, Zia Hiltey, Kane Humboldt, Andrew Johnson-Lally, Doug LaRocca, Emily Kohl-Mattingley, John Mitchell, Lauren McEwen, Kathryn Moran, Gabrielle Muller, Alicia Neal, Joslyn Newman, Duong Nguyen, Melissa Papadakis, Lucy Price, Mary Price, Josh Robeson, Jonathan Schoonover, Maria Smith, Kristen Spor-Cooper, Eric Thivierge, Ketch Wehr, Peter Wonsowski

Benna’s café

1236 S. 8th St.

Friday, July 8 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm

show runs until August 10th

Real Child Of Hell

2011-06-07T06:17:00.000-07:00

I finished this last week but kept forgetting to post it. It's the header for that huge daunting Norse universe project I'll be working on slowly for the rest of the year. It's maybe 9in wide and fits into the top of the frame (an old mirror) I got for the piece:
I also realized I hadn't posted process pictures in a while and since people sometimes ask, here's the line drawing for the painting I'm working on this month:
I draw in pencil then ink with microns and erase the pencil since the lead can mix with paint and muddy it. I basically use my own pen drawings like blank coloring book pages I paint over though I occasionally add some hatch lines and note where wrinkles and stuff will be just to give myself something to build on. I actually already painted in the background for this one, so I'll get a shot of it in that stage and then when it's painted but before I add the black outline.

This piece is for a benefit show I'll be a part of next month, I'll post more info about the show and about the piece itself later.

The Sun Is Out Spinning On Its Axis, Lead White Vapor In The Clouds

2011-06-06T07:52:00.000-07:00

This is the last painting I finished for the Across the Haunted Sea show I had in March. I didn't have a good photograph of it and haven't gone to get it scanned yet since it's pretty big (about 19 inches tall.

I've mentioned before that there have been times that the color has really gotten away from me and I think that happened here but I'm still happy with the way the detail came out in this one.

I posted about the tiny cemetery above previously, if you want to see a picture that shows scale.

I tried something I don't usually here and outlined the background city in a dark green grey so that the skeleton would be more pronounced as the foreground, since it was supposed to be overlooking the city in the distance. I think that worked ok, but I'm not sure it translates well in this photograph. It might be something I experiment with more in the future to add some more depth, as much as I like black outline.

I had a couple of ideas about sunken cities I wanted to work into this show, and this one is primarily influenced by Poe's "The City in the Sea/ The Doomed City" though I also grabbed things from previous sketches of Kitezh a legendary Russian sunken city, and a Robert E. Howard poem about a sunken city that would rise again that I had sketched out in the early stages of getting ready for that show.

As a kid with an active imagination I did a lot of daydreaming and loved staring into murky ocean water in Maine and imagining what could be down there and what it would be like to live there (ok, as a child I was really not grounded in reality), so I've always been attracted to stories about sunken cities, and ships and lost civilizations and continents. I particularly like the world view that Howard borrows from Madame Blavatsky, that there are different eras of humanity that rise up, and are swallowed by the ocean only to be replaced by the next era. I like any story that digs at the sense of specialness and permanance that most humans rely on to counteract the terrifying unpredictability and finiteness of life and the reality that the earth could wipe us out in a second and I like the idea that each era lives without realizing that they are living in a doomed society.

I have more work to post later this week to make up for my lazy silence and I'm starting a new project today.

R.F.T.W.

2011-06-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't been very good at posting this month, as I have a bunch of projects in an uninteresting half finished state, spent a weekend in new york and am now mysteriously summer sick. But I have been working and I have an older recently (somewhat poorly) photographed painting to post, as well as the finished header for that norse year-long project and am getting started on a new piece. For the time being though, here's a quick mini (2 1/2 in) rat fink I made for a friend last night:

Spit Up Blood, When You Cough

2011-05-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've been sitting on this one for a few days because I've just been too busy to write about it. I also probably should have waited to post it with color so you could make out the text but whatever. This is a shirt for my buddy Carol's store. I made one for her last year and she thought it would be cool to have another design for this summer (her store is at the shore, so she gets summer business). I'm always happy to do things for friends who tell me to draw whatever I want and pay me in records!

I decided to do a drawing of a medium expressing ectoplasm through her nose and mouth. Here are some close ups:

The whole design is supposed to be roughly heart-shaped which you can see a little better in this photo:
The practice of producing "ectoplasm" was fairly common for physical mediums and is supposed to be a physical manifestation of a spirit presence. It's often described as "gauze-like" because....it was gauze, produced from the nose, mouth, ears and well...crotches of mediums garnishing their showmanship with something physical, and was often the subject of spiritualist trick photography. Here are some of those photographs:

This is the medium Mrs. Mary Marshall producing an ectoplasmic apparition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who was an avid spiritualist and active participant in the movement.

"These emanations are reportedly warm to the touch and often are reported as thick, clotted, mucus-like substances. They can be rubbery and dough-like and emerge from a body orifice, such as the mouth, ears or nose but can also come from the eyes, navel, nipples and even the vagina. The structure of the ectoplasm varied from clouds and veils, to thin rods, membranes and heavy masses. Ectoplasm was also reported to disappear when exposed to light and would snap back violently. Touching the ectoplasm, or exposing it to light, was said to be able to cause injury to the medium. This was one of the reasons that mediums insisted that séances should take place in near darkness and that sitters should not approach the mediums or the emanations that had formed. "
-from "The Haunted Museum"

The practice of producing ectoplasm was investigated and declared a fraud by Harry Houdini who made it his mission to uncover spiritualist hoaxes using his personal knowledge of the art of illusion. Most famously he made an arrangement with his wife to contact her through a medium and deliver a secret code phrase ("Rosabelle believe") post mortem, an arrangement which she upheld for ten years after his death. Naturally his spirit never appeared, proving his point. He had also contacted H.P. Lovecraft about writing a piece debunking superstition together but it was never completed. However, if you're interested in the extremely weird results of their collaboration in fiction check out Under the Pyramids, a short story based on a "real life experience" Houdini claims to have had. You can listen to the H.P. Podcraft podcast on the story here.

If you're interesting in ghost photography, this is a really good website to poke around in (I actually saw a corresponding exhibit of this photography in NY about 5 years ago), and if you're interested in the bizarre, fraudulent and occasionally thoughtful and earnest attempts made by science and the spiritualists to quantify, explain, and make contact with spirits in the afterlife I would recommend Mary Roach's book Spook (I probably have already).

If you're in Philadelphia, or will be soon check out Mike's show at Grindcore House (opening tonight). It's all work from his ongoing obsessive project where he draws basically every creature ever mentioned by Lovecraft.
You can also follow this project on his blog, http://www.yog-blogsoth.blogspot.com/.

Hey this is my 100th post!

Second Verse, Same As The First

2011-05-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

Well, if you didn't catch it, blogger went apeshit last week and lost a whole bunch of stuff. This was perfectly timed with the long winded, link laden post I had just made about my recent trip. I'll do my best to recall what I wrote, but I don't have it in me to go all out and recreate the original so I'm just going to blow through these pictures:

Tomb entrance at Newgrange, Valley of the River Boyne, Ireland. Newgrange is part of the Brú na Bóinne complex of megalithic tombs. These would be the oldest man made structures I have ever seen (they predate the pyramids-not that I've seen those), they are astrologically aligned and contain much of the existing megalithic stone art in the world. This is the only tomb in the complex that you can enter all the way back to the burial chamber.

Knowth, Valley of the River Boyne, Ireland. Unlike Newgrange which is one large tomb, this is a whole complex of smaller tomb mounds with one larger mound. They actually have it set up so you can climb onto the top of the largest mound like people would have when it was in use. There's also tons of stone carving art here.

At the Rock of Cashel in Cashel, Co. Tipperary, Ireland. This place was amazing and crow infested and had pretty much everything I like all at once. That's me really tiny.

The ruins of the Hore Abbey, also in Cashel, Co. Tipperary. We had this pretty much to ourselves at dusk to scramble around and climb on and poke around the cemetery.

Virgin Mary statue in an Irish Cemetery.

"Aideen's Grave" a dolmen in the middle of a forest filled with huge tree height rhodedendrons, weirdly situated next to a golf course in Howth, Ireland.

Here's a crappy secret photo of the vault at St. Michan's in Dublin, Ireland, where bodies interred there in stacked coffins were naturally mummified because of the conditions in the crypt. It was here that a guide offered us an opportunity to TOUCH THE MUMMY of a crusader (for luck?!). Mike and I pretty much climbed over each other to get to it. They also have the execution order and bodies of participants of the 1798 Rebellion there.

Impressive Gothic vaulted ceiling of the abbey in Bath, England. It had a really weird unique carved facade I couldn't get a good picture of also, but check it out here.

The head of the Sulis Minerva statue from the Roman Bath ruins in Bath, England. One of my favorite things at this site was the folded metal plates with curses scratched into them that were found in the baths. People would write curses against people who wronged them and throw them into the bath in order to seek vengeance from the goddess.

The crypt at St. Leonard's Church in Hythe, Kent, England. This place was pretty amazing and neatly maintained. One of the skulls had a birds nest in it! We actually got here on the day of a wedding and had to wait for someone to let us into the crypt before the last bus out of the town left, and ended up lurking hard while the couple were taking their wedding photos.

Another picture from the crypt because it was so cool.

Anyway, I've been back for a bit now and finished up a tshirt design I'll post in full later this week. Here's a quick little sneak preview of it:

I Was A Teenage Dinosaur Stoned And Obsolete

2011-05-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

Hey I'm back from my trip (more on that later) and the first thing I did was complete an interview sent to me by Jaime over at The Living Doorway. We've been babbling like weirdos since he asked me to draw him a header for the site and he decided to interview me which is super flattering! Check it out and then poke around his site if you're interesting in downloading records (metal) and reading hilarious reviews peppered with pictures of cute dogs!

Also:

Happy B-day, DK

2011-04-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

Heya,

So, this is a special birthday themed post since the last thing I finished was this birthday card for my buddy Derek. He turns 40 today and there was a big party for him saturday where he was given pretty much the most exciting present I've ever seen, a sword made by the BARON, paid for using contributions from all of his friends and family. The thing is beautiful and was a surprisingly huge (chest high on derek who is 6 ft something or other) two handed ordeal. It has "No Gods No Masters" engraved in the blade and the Amebix face thingy set in a metal coin in the base of the hilt. Presented with much pomp and circumstance and then carelessly waved and passed around in a crowded low ceiling-ed room full of dogs and babies.

My friend (and his wife) Kristi who put the party together wanted a birthday card that mentioned "40" and featured a sword and (surprisingly hahah) couldn't find something like that so she asked me to make one. My mind went from "sword" to heraldry so I made a little crest themed painting for a jumbo sized card:
The wolf heads were particularly fun to paint:

The sword in the painting is based on the actual sword (but proportionately much smaller). I unnecessarily did a lot of reading on heraldry while working on this and the practice of "blazoning" which is just a formal protocol for describing all the visual elements in a crest. Pretty neat.

My roomate Alexis who is THE sickest cook and baker I know and I teamed up to make Derek a cake as well. I actually really like decorating cakes for friend's birthdays but can't be bothered when it comes to the actual baking part (which is probably why the battle axe cake I made for Mike last summer looked like "an iced fart"), so Alexis and I make a great team (she pretty much knows everything about this stuff!). We decided on a Discharge themed cake, and made all these little spikes out of fondant then painted them with silver dusting powder mixed with vodka to make an edible paint. I also cut the lettering out of rolled fondant. It was a vegan almond and vanilla double layer cake with raspberry between the layers. It ended up being one of three awesome cakes Derek got haha.
It's been pretty great lately having time to work on art projects for friends instead of working on a show. Right now I'm working on designing another shirt for my friend Carol's store but it probably wont be finished until I get back from my trip to Ireland and England (leaving this thursday!).

I probably wont be posting again until I get back so I'll leave you with this:

The Horrid Shapes Behind All Outward Veils That Cloak The Universe

2011-04-12T10:00:00.000-07:00

So I finished that poster last night and made a couple of color mock ups.

I'm not the best at picking colors and might have done this a little hastily but the idea was for my friend to use a slightly transparent lighter color ink for the smoke layer when printing to attempt to replicate the smoke effect I like to do in paintings. I think it looks a lot better and more legible (also way creepier) on grey paper with bright colored smoke:

All in all I think the drawing came out well and the printing should work fairly well. This is for the upcoming Des Ark LP recorded live at WXDU on my friend Mike Brennan's label Paramnesia Records. Like all the good things it is a true labor of love and mostly exists to release projects he's excited about for his friends. Mike is an awesome dude dedicated to building community and has done a billion favors for me (if it weren't for him I would pretty much never have a functioning computer which is important these days) so it's cool to be able to do something for him. The poster will be an bonus insert for preordered copies of the record so if you like Des Ark and want a poster get on it!

It's also worth noting that I have done two other skull faced owl drawings, one about 4 years ago and one about 2 years ago, both of which came out so so and as a result I never used any of them in shows or to make prints, but I really like this drawing. A lot of birds have that strange ocular bone that looks like a pair of goggles in the skull which can make drawing the skulls in just black and white and the eye set in it come out sort of weird and confusing.
Anyway, this was fun to do, especially all the detail in the feathers. Finishing up a few projects before I leave for my trip next week!

Along The Draughty Corridors For Miles And Miles She Goes

2011-04-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

So this week I finished that suprise piece I can't post for a little while still and got started on the final drawing for the print I sketched out last week. Decided on a horizontal orientation so I could have the owl's wings out.
There are a lot of things I'm still working out, like whether the smoke will be solid or translucent, and what kind of color to use. My friend's one request was that it not be too hard for him to register, and I'm still working out the kinks in making separations and easily screen printed designs for other people. I've gotten so used to using every color at my disposal it's also really hard for me to think of a limited color design (in this case paper, linework, smoke color). This will just be linework so once I get to the inking stage it should be relaxing and simple, which I'm looking forward to. The pencil drawing for black and white stuff is always way more involved than the drawings for full color things which are more like blank coloring book pages.

I think he needs more mushrooms too. The symbolism here is pretty obvious so I wont bore anyone but I've been trying to integrate regeneration and decay into pieces here and there and maybe someday I'll do a whole painting about it. It seemed appropriate when my friend requested another one of the skull faced animals for this poster.

Also check out all of these amazing mushrooms which I read about both while reading up about bioluminescence (for another project I should start soon!) and looking for mushroom pictures to reference for this drawing. I've actually spotted a few things on that site, like this stinkhorn (seriously) but would really love to see some of these biolumenscent mushrooms:
In other (appropriately skull faced animal) news I experimented with embedding something in resin for the first time this weekend and it came out really well. I have a growing collection of dessicated dead mice sent to me by my aunt (she calls them "pompeii mice") and dead bats and stuff from the warehouse where my partner works. I really have no idea what to do with them and this weekend I was given a small bottle of resin and tried it out. Here's the mouse before:
and here he is in the resin:

My favorite part which I was most concerned with preserving was the way its spine and skull are exposed and lead into whats left of the body cavity. This was actually a little tricky because when I got to the second embedding layer of resin I had to pour it into the mouse's body to keep it from floating. I got some air bubbles and he sank into the first layer of resin because it wasn't solid enough when i put him in but it mostly came out ok. I think he looks like a little pushead drawing (minus the bandages). Anyway, resin! It's pretty cool.

Also worth noting I'm going to Ireland and England this month using the money I made from that last show. So far I've been able to turn the profit from all three of my shows into a trip, which is really ideal. I've been to Ireland before but never to England, and we're doing some last minute planning so if there's anything you recommend let me know! I like neolithic stone sites, castles, skeletons and reliquaries, beautiful natural spots and grim historical stuff. I also poked around the Website for the Tate and discovered that they have a lot of stuff I'd really like to see in real life which is really exciting. I'm especially excited about these two:

William Blake-The Night of Enitharmon's Joy (formerly called `Hecate')

John William Waterhouse- The Magic Circle

Yes!

Huginn To The Hanged And Muninn To The Slain

2011-03-29T07:22:00.000-07:00

Heya

I'm feeling uncharacteristically down on stuff lately so I admittedly haven't been very productive. Here's a few process pictures of stuff I have managed to get started.

The ink drawing for the topper that will go on the frame for the giant piece I have in the works:
And a shot of it as I started to paint it last week. I've gotten way further since:
This is Huginn and Muninn Odin's ravens (thought and memory) flanking his eye which will be positioned at the top of the frame looking down at the whole world that will (hopefully, by the end of the year) be rendered below it.

Basically for this project which will take place over the span of en entire year, I needed to think of a subject that would be able to do in pieces on a large scale. It's hard to explain but the way the paint I use seems to work, and the rate at which it starts to dry out and separate after being mixed means making one big uniform area of color is really hard for me. I wanted to do something with a layered world with a lot of different textures and colors, something where I could represent water, forests, sky, creatures, and subterranean creeps. It occurred to me that the Norse structure of the universe would give me lots of opportunity to do all that. I'll write more about it when it's a bit more underway.

Aside from this project I'm working on a present I can't post for a couple more weeks, and starting a small poster for a friend to be used as a bonus insert for pre-orders of a record he's putting out. Here's a sketch for it:
This is a noteworthy sketch because generally my sketches are jumbled completely unrendered garbage that I can't make heads or tales of even a few days after making it. Observe:
Good thing I labeled everything?

Bleh.

All That Tread The Globe Are But A Handful To The Tribes That Slumber In its Bosom

2011-03-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hey hey,

I have a few more images from the show. You can see pictures of the opening on Part Time's site (including a photo of the awesome anchor shaped cookies my mom made!). Here's a picture our friend Roxy took of the window vinyl:
And here are a few photos my friend Ryann took of two of the pieces, the Melusine with some close ups:

And one of the whale bones I had previously only posted close ups of:

I also thought I'd talk about flea markets for a minute. Around PA (and Jerz) we have "farmers markets" that are not at all what you are picturing. While they do sell produce and supplies, they are essentially elaborate dirtmalls with extensive outdoor (and indoor) flea markets where people sell all kinds of terrific (and pointless) junk. Whole stalls of rusty metal, single watch bands, 12 packs of dollar store bras for 5 bucks (suspicious), knock off handbags, bins filled with hundreds of dirty toys, knives, swords, biker jewelry, cassettes, old magazines and comics, essentially heaven for cheap junkhounds. There are also many food stands but my friends and I have a long standing personal rule to never eat from the dirt mall that is only broken at the Berlin Mart apple cider donut stand. My two favorite are the Berlin Mart (NJ) and the Quakertown Mart (PA) (aka Qmart) where I found this:
Framing for shows can be really expensive, even when you do it yourself with cheap(er) ikea frames, and while I think uniform plain frames can be good and less distracting I'm usually after weird shapes and elaborate decorative frames so all of mine come from one of three places: the aforementioned farmers markets where I've picked up dozens of frames usually for 1-6 bucks, from my aunt who finds them at thrift stores in Nebraska and mails them to me, and my grandfather's basement. Last weekend we went to the Berlin mart for the first time since the fall and I did really well:
I got those four frames plus another round one I didn't photograph (plus all of that other awesome junk). I'm generally after gold, round or oval, decorative frames. I think all four of those came to 3 dollars. At this point I have a pretty good stockpile of weird medium to small size frames and just grab one and make a piece to fit when I think of something appropriate. I recommend this tactic as you 1) save money 2) don't buy something new when something used works just as well 3) give your money to a flea market weirdo instead of a big company and 4) will have a bunch of really cool looking frames.

Unrelated to art my second most sought after items are "shitty gorillas" for my collection of poorly produced and poorly painted plastic gorillas:
Anyway, hopefully soon I'll have a scan of the last piece I did for the show, some babble about Kull and Atlantis, and some process photos of what I'm working on now, which is my piece for the "1 Year Project" (heads up, my piece is Norse themed and huge).

Originals for sale online!

2011-03-12T14:37:00.000-08:00

Hey, guess what! The gallery hosting my most recent show will have an online store up for a limited time where you can buy a framed original piece of mine or Mike's. And they ship! Feel free to contact me for better images of pieces I haven't posted yet if you can't make them out from the webstore photos.
Visit the store here:
http://www.parttimestudios.bigcartel.com/

Infinitus Sleep Has Ended

2011-03-09T10:27:00.000-08:00

I'm waiting for some photos of some of the bigger (less easily scann-able) pieces from the show to post in full here as well as some photos taken of everything hanging and the opening itself, so in the meantime here's the full scan of the Bake-Kujira I just posted a close up of previously:

and a close up of the weird pink water:
and a close of up of one of the weird birds:
I'll write a longer entry about the show when I get some images to share, and when i have some more rambling junk about what I'm working on next.

So We Go Inside And We Gravely Read The Stones

2011-02-28T07:00:00.000-08:00

I'll save my long update for later this week when I have everything photographed and scanned but I finished my last piece for the show. Here's a teeny tiny detail I thought I should post since it's doubtful anyone will notice it otherwise. A cemetery the size of a nickle in the sunken city painting:
The frames are mostly painted, most of the backings are cut, just assembling the display boxes that Josh made for me (expertly as usual), getting all the hanging devices in order etc. If everything is ready to go by wed I might make two miniature last minute pieces. I'd really like to get to those but I'm trying to be reasonable. Until then, more coffee!

Light From Out The Lurid Sea

2011-02-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

Heyyyyyy. Having a bit of trouble keeping up with the blog at the moment since I'm in the home stretch of the show work I have left to do. Next week when the show is ready to hang I'll probably have a ton of stuff to post including full scans of things I just posted parts of and photographs of things framed.

I finished the last painting on bone I had to do. It's the one on what is possibly a whale's growth plate. Well, it's definitely from a whale and theoretically a growth plate:
This thing is a Marool, an obscure little creature I found an excerpt about in one of my books.

"The Marool was a sea devil who took the form of a fish, and was a very malignant creature. He had a crest of flickering flame, and eyes all over his head. He often appeared in the centre of mareel-that is sea foam when it is phosphorescent. He delighted in storm, and was heard to shout his wild exultant song when some luckless bark went under"

I'm so-so on how this came out. It straddles the line between creepy and silly, though it might just read this way to me because I can't stop being reminded of this:
Also this particular bone was covered in ridges since it seems to have formed in rings like a tree so it was pretty tricky to paint on.

I also started what will be the last of my bigger paintings, one based on Poe's the City in the Sea.
The color is vibrating pretty bad in this photo but it's a bit less glaring in person. I can't say Im particularly excited to paint a bunch of buildings as straight lines are not my strong suit but I think it'll come out pretty cool.
I also wanted to mention the book where I found the blurb about the Marool. My buddy Ned got this for me for my birthday and it's great. Don't be fooled by the title, it's not so much about literal fairies as it is about the supernatural world in British/Scottish/Welsh/Irish folklore. It's FULL of stories about ghost dogs that haunt moors, long-armed swamp hags who drown lost travelers, ghost lights in the woods and banshees.
I have another book by Katherine Briggs and it's also really good. Her research is great and the excerpts have general descriptions along with synopsis of related folktales and the index in the back is arranged by theme, which is really cool.

I actually also found a little more information about the Melusine which I wrote about last week. According to this book her husband first began to suspect her supernatural background when their children were each born more and more deformed and evil. One of them, called "Geoffroi with the Tusk" burned down an abbey and killed a hundred monks. When her husband lashed out at her in response Melusine pledged to appear to each lord of his family before his death until the entire line had vanished, much like the ghost barge and banshee lore I mentioned a month ago. I love when a bunch of things I'm reading about end up having some common thread like this.

I have so much stuff to do. sob.

If I Rock Upon The Waves, Then No Corpse Can Lie Upon Me

2011-02-14T08:00:00.000-08:00

I took me two weeks but I finally finished that big piece. Last week was kind of a wash, so I did most of the work on the weekend and once again messed my hand up painting scales for like 10 hours. Here are a couple photos of it. I'm still figuring out how to get something this big scanned:
This is the Melusine, a (often) twin tailed serpent woman from Medieval European literature and folklore. She married a mortal while in human form with the stipulation that he never see her bathing every Saturday. Naturally, he peeked and saw her in her serpent form at which point she flew away (in some stories she can still be found roaming as serpent or beautiful woman with a golden key in her mouth). The idea of mortals marrying gods and supernatural creatures is present in a lot of myths and stories, and usually comes with some caveat like this, and pretty much always ends poorly. The twin tailed mermaid image is also used as an alchemical symbol, and in heraldic imagery:
Here she is fleeing the castle:
When I was planning this out I wanted to make some nod to the medieval habit of using arbitrary scale in artwork, presenting a building as tall as a person, focusing more on narrative than realistic presentation. I also combined my idea for the Melusine sketch with a sketch I did based on a Robert E. Howard poem, the Singer in the Mist.

"At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells,
And I have trod strange highroads all my days,
Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways.
I grope for stems of broken asphodels;
HIgh on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells,
I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze;
And ghosts have led me through the moonlight's haze
To talk with demons in the granite hells.

Seas crash upon dragon-guarded shores,
Bursting in crimson moons of burning spray,
And iron castles ope to me their doors,
And serpent-women lure with harp and lay.
The misty waves shake now to phantom oars—
Seek not for me; I sail to meet the day. "

If I haven't recommended his poetry before, I am now. 50% of it is about werewolves.

So, I've noticed that Pelikan Plaka is becoming less and less available and decided to start trying out a few new kinds of paint. My two biggest requirements are that it have a matte finish, and be opaque with a high level of pigment. Also water soluble.

I got a couple jars of this Turner Neo Color and so far I'm really into it. I will admit I was drawn in by the labels which don't seem to have changed since it was first intruduced in the 60's and by the fact that it comes in fairly large jars (and can also be purchased in what are basically small buckets). It's made for sign painting and design much like Plaka, but is a bit more fluid, cheaper, and doesn't have the same alarming chemical smell. It also doesn't build as quickly on the paper so the finished product is relatively free of all that pesky texture which bothers me so much.
I also tried out some of this Acryl Gouache. It's pretty cool but a bit more expensive and less fluid than the neo color, but with really bright opaque colors. Not bad! I'll still be bummed if Plaka disappears altogether though, because somehow their black is the BLACKEST and that's essential.

Anyway, I'm hoping to crank out two more pieces before doing all the framing and whatever else I think I can squeeze in before the show. Listening to Fever Ray and getting weird. Bleh!

Last Minute Group Show!

2011-02-09T15:40:00.001-08:00

This flier is really heinous. Anyway my friend Alicia who's an extremely nauseatingly talented artist works at a fancy flower shop and curated a little show for what they're hoping will become a second Thursday regular event. It's in liberty walk, a creepy pre-fab art community in No. Libs. Most of the people in this show are my cool talented friends so if you're around check it out! Also PIZZA. She asked for pieces with animals or flowers in them so I gave her that Laurel Hill piece.

Bury Me At Sea, Where No Murdered Ghost Can Haunt Me

2011-02-04T05:00:00.000-08:00

Well as of right now I have 5 pieces finished for my show, with one in progress and two more on deck (pardon the unintentional nautical pun). I finished the Bake-kujira which I posted an in progress photo of last week. Im back to just posting in progress and sneak peak photos until closer to my show when I'll hopefully have good scans and nice photos of the full pieces. Here's a shot of the finished Bake-kujira:
The color is pretty off there, the background is actually green. Strange.

I'm really excited about the piece I just started. It's the Melusine, a two tailed mermaid/serpent woman from medieval French literature, who married a human and attempted to hide her monstrous secret from him. I'll write more about that later. Here's a close up of the pencil stage:
And here's a shot of it with the background finished:
What's really exciting is how I've managed to scale up for this show. I guess I'm getting faster because These pieces have the same amount of detail but are all as large or larger than the biggest pieces from my last show. This one of Melusine is the biggest so far and I'm putting it in a mirror frame I got at a dirt mall:
Here it is with a regulation size cat, Mr. Vinegar Vincent Price, in it ^ I like the way it looks gold but I'll be painting it black for the show since all of my pieces will be in black frames and all of Mike's will be in gold. Because this one is a little bigger I'm assuming it'll take about a week and a half to finish since there's a lot of water detail, the detail in the castle bricks and all the scales on her tail. Woof. After that I'm aiming for another medium sized piece and that final whale bone.

I'd really like to do a few little fun things for this show, like design a button set to give out, and make some screen printed labels to put on the back of all the pieces as well as looking into getting some limited runs of prints made to have available at the show. But first priority is making the paintings. I was also going to try to make some anchor shaped cookies for the show. What's my problem?

Next week I'll hopefully have a lot more of this painting done and will also probably make a long winded post about supplies since the Pelikan Plaka well seems to have run dry and I just bought a whole bunch of other kinds of gauche and casein paints to experiment with. Oh and I'll be busy turning 30 tomorrow .

I Come Old Friend From Hell Tonight, Across The Rotting Sea

2011-01-25T07:05:00.000-08:00

Soooooo it's slow going at the moment. It took a while to get my drawing down last week and I had a lot of stuff to do over the weekend so I didn't buckle down like I usually do (read: I went outside!). Here are a few in progress photos of the Bake-kujira:
The Bake-kujira is a ghost whale attended by strange fish and birds in Japanese folklore. I'm so-so on how it's coming out, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to draw something that had a visible skeleton. The link I provided above is to the Obakemono Project which is really cool and worth checking out. It's a series of little stylized illustrations and entries on yokai.

Hey, check it out, here's a show card:

Please come!

There are so many things I want to do for this show but as always I have limited time. I'm still thinking about doing Melusine, something about a sunken city either from Poe's "The City in the Sea" or an R.E.H. poem (he has a lot to say about Atlantis), something about sailors valentines, and maybe something about drowned sailors getting revenge (like from all those E.C. comics and the Fog, and this song which is so unbelievably stuck in my head right now). I'm also still mulling over how to do something related to the Flying Dutchman or Davy Jones even though those two bits of folklore got Disneyed to death with the Pirates of the Caribbean. Also still working my way through that William Hope Hodgson book.

I'm getting the winter crazies and hoping that this show being done will correspond with the beginning of spring. As much as I like snow and even sometimes the cold I'm getting pretty stir crazy and would like to be able to ride my bike without eating shit on the ice and so on.

Such Is The Way Of Demons, The Wont Of Devils

2011-01-19T09:34:00.000-08:00

Soooooo I hated making this painting. Remember how I said there seemed to be something up with the paper I used for the last one? Well there's definitely something up. It's obviously my fault for using it again, but this time it was way worse, with any mixed paint I used separating and smearing on the paper (but working fine on other papers I tested it on). I had a mini meltdown Friday night and almost scrapped it but worked through the problems, making some color concessions to use premixed paints I had. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
Wtf? It was basically like having someone slap your pencil as you write. Every time I put the brush down on the paper it got worse. The red in the purple I mixed was sinking into the paper while the blue was smearing around on top which meant anytime I brushed back over a spot the blue lifted off and magenta/purple smeared out from underneath.

Annnnyyyyway. This guy is a Devil Whale, or Aspidochelone, orrr Jasconius. It's a pretty pervasive idea in various folklore, but I first remember reading about it in the Voyages of Sinbad as a kid. It's a "whale", giant fish or giant sea turtle that, according to medieval bestiaries, lures sailors onto its back as it has the basic appearance of a small uninhabited island. When the sailors light a fire to cook food the monster awakens and pulls them and their ship to the bottom of the ocean. Here are a few old illustrations of some:The little seaweed fins on my guy where inspired by this totally weird Tassled Wobbegong a kind of "carpet shark":

I didn't make it a literal whale because so many things described as whales in maritime lore are not literal whales, and sometimes things called "devil whales" where further described as being giant sea turtles.

Doing all those tiny scales meant gripping a brush super hard for a full day so my hand is pretty brutalized at the moment. I took Monday to just lay around reading and sketching. I've been working my way through this book:
A collection of short ocean themed horror stories by William Hope Hodgson. Previously I had only read the Voice in the Dawn an extremely creepy fungus themed story which was adapted by Toho in the weirdest most psychedelic way ever into this movie, Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People which is also very entertaining on it's own merits:

All the stories I've read so far from this collection have been great, and Hodgson is particularly good at making the ships and the ocean itself sound like endlessly dark mysterious places, with horrible unseen things lurking in shadowy corners and snatching people away one by one. I recommend it!

Anyway, I'm slacking this week and really need to pick up the pace. Ow. My hand.

Red Sky At Night, Sailor's delight, Red Sky In Morning, Sailor's Warning

2011-01-10T08:27:00.000-08:00

Still working at what I've determined is my maximum pace, I finished another week-long piece yesterday. The bulk of the progress was made Friday when Mike and I watched SEVEN movies, (five of which were John Carpenter) while our good for nothing cats^ slept blissfully on the radiator, not a care in their little pea brains.

The most intense but strangely hypnotic to work on part of this one was the water. I actually spent a long time wrestling with the sky, and had to make some (luckily positive) edits after finding I was having the same streaky paint problem I've had in the past. I'm pretty sure the problem is actually the particular paper I occasionally use, but both times I've had to rework the sky because of it it's come out better than I planned. Some close ups:
The image is based on an account I read in this really cool book:
Which is a collection of available information on the occult at the turn of the century (no new age junk). There's a Scottish story about the Macdonalds of Glencoe, who were transporting the chief of their clan to an island for burial when his body was lost in a storm at sea. From that point forward the phantom funeral skiff would appear to members of the clan as a portent of doom anytime something tragic was about to happen to them. It was said to be accompanied by ghostly female mourners loudly singing a dirge.

The candles are "fetch-lights" or "ghost candles" which supposedly appeared above an unburied body or at the place where a body was lost at sea, or as warnings of death. There's a bit of information on them in the Encyclopedia of occultism and even more in this book from the 70's, which has an incredibly cool cover:
The term fetch is generally applied to a vision of a doomed person's doppelganger before their death, which typically appears to a loved one or to the person themselves (terrifying!). Additionally the Irish and Scottish banshee (bean sidhe and bean shith respectively) is very much related to the tone of the phantom funeral skiff, as banshees are typically attached to a particular clan and appear before deaths of members until the clan has died out. Apparently if the banshee is the spirit of someone close to the family who loved them they appear calmly to escort the damned person like an angel, but if they are the spirit of someone who hated the family they appear to scream gleefully because another member of the family is dead.

Now is a good time to mention the fact that I grew up afraid of banshees and still think about what I would do if one showed up screaming at my window. Related to the fetch, my aunt on the Italian side of my family once told me about the superstition that family members see a vision of a person about to die and told me she saw her great uncle with whom she shared a birthday in a dream the night he died. Needless to say this was horrifying to me.

Incidentally the title of this post comes from a bit of fisherman's weather lore my grandfather told me about when I was a kid.

Anyway. Back to my perpetual panic. Up next will probably be a Devil Whale. I also still have one more bone to paint on but it's been impossible to sand down.

Raise A Stone For All To See, Runes Carved To My Memory

2010-12-29T13:50:00.000-08:00

Hey hey!
This will be my last post of the new year no doubt. Over 40 posts in the past year and virtually all of them included artwork I did so I can assume I managed to accomplish a good amount of work in 2010. I'm feeling pretty good about that right now, which takes the sting off of the reality that I am currently pretty behind on work for my show. Anyway, down to that business, I finished the second whale bone:

I decided to paint this guy after reading about a lake serpent described on the northernmost standing rune stone in Sweden:
This stone stood by the lake in Storsjön and supposedly depicted a serpent called Storsjöodjuret bound head to tail by a ribbon. In various stories the serpent was bound by the ribbon or by the runestone itself trapped in the lake circled head to tail around the island Frösön waiting to be freed to wreck havoc on the inhabitants.
It reminded me of the Midgard serpent and the Ouroboros in that it was a serpent coiled head to tail and that its reawakening meant doom for the inhabitants. There were also stories about the origin of the monster one of which involves it's creation by trolls.

"A long, long time ago two trolls, Jata and Kata, stood on the shores of the Great-Lake brewing a concoction in their cauldrons. They brewed and mixed and added to the liquid for days and weeks and years. They knew not what would result from their brew but they wondered about it a great deal. One evening there was heard a strange sound from one of their cauldrons. There was a wailing, a groaning and a crying, then suddenly came a loud bang. A strange animal with a black serpentine body and a cat-like head jumped out of the cauldron and disappeared into the lake. The monster enjoyed living in the lake, grew unbelievably larger and awakened terror among the people whenever it appeared. Finally, it extended all the way round the island of Frösön, and could even bite its own tail. Ketil Runske bound the mighty monster with a strong spell which was carved on a stone and raised on the island of Frösön. The serpent was pictured on the stone. Thus was the spell to be tied till the day someone came who could read and understand the inscription on the stone."

What's stranger is that in modern times the Storsjöodjuret has entered the realm of modern cryptozoology with people attempting to record evidence of it's existence. It was even supposedly added to the endangered species list for a brief time. There are a couple of websites devoted to the cause. Here it is:

um yeah...totally

In designing this particular creature I looked for images of viking ships and torc serpents and some celtic knotwork. Weirdly enough while I was home for the holidays I found some old instructional books on celtic spiral and lettering work that were my grandmother's:
It's always exciting to me to find something that belonged to her because we shared so many interests so I'm happy to have these, especially the lettering guide. As a person with the utmost appreciation for ridiculous life-wasting tedium and detail I can really appreciate stuff like the Book of Kells and other illuminated manuscripts and I think its unfortunate that most people only see this stuff as it has been appropriated into countless bad tattoos.

Oh also speaking of the Ouroboros , check out this REAL LIFE one I found out about yesterday:

twins!

"The Armadillo Lizard possesses an uncommon antipredator adaptation, in which it takes its tail in its mouth and rolls into a ball when frightened. In this shape it is protected from predators by the thick, squarish scales along its back and the spines on its tail."

One more thing and then I'll shut up. So, it turns out I collect Tarot cards. It wasn't really intentional but I kept picking up decks with artwork I like and it's gotten to the point where I think it's officially a collection. Mike got me the most amazing deck for Christmas, the Russian St. Petersburg deck illustrated by the Russian miniature painter Yuri Shakov.
What's especially amazing about this deck is the fact that all of the illustrations were painted TO SCALE, meaning the center images were painted at a size that is rarely bigger than 2 1/2 inches. Totally insane. I mean, I think I paint small until I look at stuff like this! I took photos of some of my favorite ones:

Happy New Year, creeps!

Bit By A Dog With A Rabid Tooth

2010-12-22T05:00:00.000-08:00

Heyaaaa

I finished the first whale rib painting this weekend. It actually went a lot faster than I thought considering how tricky it was. It's like painting on wood in that I have to give up and accept that there are minuscule flaws in the surface that might occasionally mess up teeny tiny details that most likely no one but myself will notice. I'm just going to post a few detail shots until closer to my show when my photographer friend has taken better photos of it.
I'm still trying to figure out whether I should coat it with the same gloss enamel I used on that deer jaw I painted. I keep going back and forth about it and worry about ruining it so if anyone has an opinion go ahead and share it! If it makes any difference these are all going to be displayed on black velvet in shadow boxes for the show so hopefully glare wont be a huge concern.

This guy is a Rosmarus, the result of what is clearly a "whisper down the lane" type description of a walrus (the scientific name for the walrus is actually Odobenus rosmarus!). Imagine if you had never seen a walrus or anything like it and were forced to describe it using only animals in your pool of reference. Something like "a fish with the head of a dog" actually starts to make sense. It was also sometimes described as having the head of a horse which is actually a little baffling to me. It is also believed to be directly related to the heraldic "marine wolf". Here are some old cartographic illustrations of them:

It was actually believed that they walked onto the land to drink dew! That second illustration is from the Carta Marina, which is really interesting in it's own right! A lot of the monsters in bestiaries and medieval literature are represented on it. I've been looking at a lot of maps like this lately:
I've mentioned before that I'm doing this next show with Mike. I don't usually post too much work by other people on here but I'm so excited about this poster he just finished for our Australian friends Dave and Pete that I wanted to share it:
Goddamn! It's really cool living and working next to someone whose work you really like. We're going to check out the space sometime soon to try and figure out how best to fill it and split it up.

My friend Nishat just mailed us these amazing old barf bags for Mark of the Devil. Maybe we should give out barf bags at the door for our show....

It wont be that scary....

In other news work sucks, and this is me lately:

How Can You Call This A Home, When You Know It's A Grave?

2010-12-16T05:57:00.000-08:00

I'll be brief because I'm writing this using the small chunk of personal time I've been able to grab at work lately.

Whale bones (bones in general) are hard to work with! While the crosses from my show were a tricky shape to compose in, these bones are a tricky shape and have the additional issue of curves and bumps. After a failed attempt at transferring an ill-fitted drawing and having to use a palm sander to get it off I finally worked out an image that I think fits the shape of this first bone and successfully transfered it. I have a whole new respect for tattoo artists who have to compose and draw around a 3 dimensional form.
Luckily, bone is much easier to paint on than it is to draw on, and I got the sky painted in quickly last night. This little guy is a sea wolf, one of many many ocean/land creature hybrids that were so popular in old bestiaries.
Oh I've also been meaning to post of picture of my bad habit, cleaning my brush on my left hand as I work:

I know, I have the tiniest hands.

I also just found this saved link about a cemetery in Russia where hungry bears are eating corpses. When the two women in the article first saw the bear hunched over a corpse they thought that he was a man in a fur coat (as this weird cgi reenactment from a Chinese news show demonstrates). I'd like to draw that.

She Comes From The Mountains In The Deep Of The Night

2010-12-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

So for no real reason and despite the fact that I'm starting to panic about my upcoming show I did a little painting for a friend. I really wanted to do something about La Befana since it's that time of year so here she is:

La Befana (or La Strega, meaning "the witch")is a strange Italian Christmas witch, more popular there than Santa, but performing the same basic function; delivering presents to good children and coal to bad. It's pretty obvious that she's a pagan holdover given that there's absolutely no reason for a witch to be part of a Christian holiday though there are origin stories shoe-horning her into the nativity story. It's been theorized that she's a holdover of Hecate, and Roman winter festival goddesses like Strenia. In general there is a pretty interesting tradition of Italian witchcraft (Stregheria), with figures who seem more like traditional healing women. There's even a very popular and potent after dinner liquour called "Strega" which I choked down last time my dad offered it to me simply because the bottle was so cool:

ps- it is really truly nasty.

Like I said it's about time I panicked about my upcoming show in March. Despite the fact that it's a joint show with Mike the space is big enough that I actually have to complete a lot of work. The show is ocean themed and Mike is doing a lot of awesome sea bestiary stuff so I think I'm going to concentrate more on lore without being too literal. The first four pieces that I'm hoping to finish in the next month and a half are actually going to be done on whale bones.

I actually got these bones about 5 years ago when visiting my grandfather in Maine. He told me that a dead Minke whale had recently washed up in a cove right below someone's house. He and a few other guys had tried towing it out to the nearby island with their boats but it kept washing back to the same spot. Knowing what a gross-o I am he suggested I check it out though he very practically stated that "people already took all the good stuff". So my friend Jess, my brother and I hiked down the rocks for over an hour till we found the cove. The smell. Not only was there a rotting whale in that cove but by some freak chance there was also a dead deer! We picked around at what was left and I grabbed three ribs and a mystery item while Jess actually hacked a vertebre off the spinal cord. She and I lived together at the time and I can say that despite a full year of sun drying and bleaching that thing never stopped smelling disgusting (probably the marrow) and we had to throw it out. My grandfather suggested that my mystery item might be a "growth plate" but I can't really find any information about it. If there are any um...whale biologists or strange weekend hobbyists with a lot of knowledge about whale anatomy reading this let me know what this thing is?
Know what's interesting? The sudden realization after sanding a bunch of bones that you are covered in haunted bone dust.
I'm actually really excited to paint on them because it reminds me of sailor's scrimshaw and because the bones are attached to that little personal adventure. I'm still working out how exactly to frame and mount them.

I've also been doing a lot of reading to get some ideas if anyone has any suggestions. Anything ocean related, folklore, horror stories, true stories, ghost ships, cryptids. I have a few ideas right now for sunken cities, Melusine, islands that turn out to be gigantic submerged monsters and a Nordic sea serpent twisted around an island based on an image on a runic stone.

I was reading through "The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard" last night remembering that a lot of the stories and poems in there are set in an ocean town and found a little quote that pretty perfectly summed up the relationship with the ocean I was considering:

"The sea-the great, grey, cold-eyed woman of the ages. Her tides spoke to me as they have spoken to me since birth- in the swish of the flat waves along the sand, in the wail of the ocean-bird, in her throbbing silence. I am very old and very wise (brooded the sea), I have no part of man; I slay men and even their bodies I fling back upon the cowering land. There is life in my bosom but it is not human life (whispered the sea), my children hate the sons of men"

PS. I uploaded a mix to my friend's 2010 song exchange blog. If anyone is interested...

The Haunted Bookshelf

2010-12-09T05:56:00.000-08:00

So I realized the other day that in all my rambling about process and art supplies and blah blah I hadn't really talked about the many books I mine for interesting ideas and visual inspiration. I wont go through my whole weird cluttered library now but I was looking at the stuff I use often and the stuff I've been looking at recently in preparation for my upcoming show and thought some of it was worth sharing. I'll probably do more posts like these in the future either when I get new books or when one is relevant to something I'm working on.

This first book is my absolute favorite. I got it at Caliban Books back when I lived in Pittsburgh. They had it in the window for weeks and I went by to ogle it several times but being a much less solvent 20 year old, the 30 dollar price tag seemed out of my range. I finally set aside some money and got it and it was so worth it. It is absolutely packed with amazing illustrations and information about every occult topic. There's extensive information about witchcraft and alchemy and because it predates the era of New Age is untainted by the boring corny stuff a lot of later texts are riddled with.
I'm so so glad I bought this book because it seems extremely hard to find at this point (though I see some other books on the same topic by the author on amazon) and I use it all the time.
If you aren't familiar with Taschen books and you're a fan of big beautiful books full of amazing images and reference you really need to check them out. This is one of my favorites and is the best collection of alchemy info and imagery I've found so far. And in full color!
It's easy to find but is now mysteriously expensive (I think it was around 20 bucks when I originally got it!)
This is another one of my favorite books. My awesome friend Roxy gave to to me for my last birthday. It's relatively light on illustrations but full of information. I usually make an attempt to read these big non-fiction books from front to back and fail, and that's the case here but flipping through randomly I always find something interesting. It's very very historically based and filled with real life accounts that sound pretty much exactly like the plot of The Devils.
Sparsely illustrated compared to the others but the ones that are in there are really cool!

This last book is something I bought for my upcoming show about sea monsters (and general ocean lore). I bought it sight unseen on amazon for a dollar or so (it's a used library book) and was so stoked when it arrived and ended up being a pretty huge book full of neat pictures and blurbs about folklore and images.

It also has tons of information about first hand accounts of sea monster encounters and the whole last half is dedicated to REAL sea monsters (giant squid, deep sea creatures, sharks, prehistoric ocean life). I can say that between this book and a couple of others I got on the topic I am now embarrassingly totally convinced of the existence of Loch Ness monster type creatures (maybe not actually in loch ness...sigh)

In related news, the guy over at monster brains posted a short, sea monster themed, Junji Ito comic in full. I love Junji Ito's comics simply for their disturbing grossness. Remember to read right to left:

The Thing that Drifted Ashore

For All The Works Of Cultured Man Must Fare and Fade and Fall

2010-12-01T08:03:00.000-08:00

Hey!

So it's been a while since I wrote on this because I really haven't completed any work (I try really hard to only post when I have something to show). I spent the month of November constantly working or traveling and just last week got back from a 10 day trip to Romania.

Predictably Romania was beautiful and strange. Wallachia was sort of a bummer (very industrial) but Transylvania and Maramureş were amazing. The Carpathian mountains are beautiful and spooky, and it was incredible to be in little medieval fortified cities like Sighişoara and Brașov and see them looming in the distance. The orthodox churches were filled with some of the most amazing art, floor to ceiling with elaborate iconstasis and bright frescos and patterns and gold leaf on every conceivable surface. We saw insane wooden architecture (similar to stuff you'd see in Russia or Norway) and carved wooden gates in Barsana, the ruins of Vlad Țepeș' fortress, Poienari, 1,480 steps up into the mountains, an ancient oak forest in Sighişoara, and best of all the Merry Cemetery in Sapanta. I'll just describe it briefly here since I'm aiming to write a longer entry at the blog Mike and I started for our creepy travel stories (corpsealtar), but it's basically a cemetery in a small town where all of the markers were hand-carved and hand painted by an amazing local artist and included images of the people as they were in life, or the way they died along with inscriptions that ranged from whimsical to grim and curse-laden. Here are a few pictures:

The Merry Cemetery

The mind-blowing home of Stan Ioan Pătraş the artist behind the Merry Cemetery

Full moon in Brasov Breite plateau ancient oak forest

Barsana Monastary Curtes de Arges

There was so much going on here visually, I felt pretty inspired the whole time, and tried to take pictures of absolutely everything. Luckily I found a great book of the collection from the Museum of Romanian Art which was FULL of incredible icon paintings, embroideries and medieval metal pieces.

Sadly, I've felt less than inspired in the week since I got back since I immediately worked a 7 day week of 10 hour days at my mind numbing job. Right about now is when I should be working on one of two things; my upcoming show with Mike in March, or the "Year Long Project". The year long project was conceived with some friends during a conversation about my inability to make anything really physically large with the level of detail I like to use because of the fact that I work so much. I said something to the effect of "it would take me a whole year to make a painting that big" and we all realized it might be fun to organize a group show of pieces that were made slowly over the course of a year. Eventually we'll be starting a group blog to mark our progress, and basically I just added a consistent undercurrent of additional stress and pressure to my next year. However I'm pretty excited to try to do something really intricate. I bought a "frame" at the thrift store down the street which is actually a huge mirror with an ornate frame. It's about4 ft by 3 ft.

Annnnyway rather than work on either of those things I've been obsessing over pagan winter festivals that have been held over and adapted to Christianity and decided to make a card for some friends. I'll post the line drawing for the La Befana (more on that later) one but the Krampus one I'm working on really isn't coming out right so I'll probably scrap it and start over in a few weeks. Can you tell how much I love the The Old Witch from The Haunt of Fear?
I would also like to take this moment to say that I'm pretty much done with Micron pens. They completely blow and I've wasted so much money on them the past two years when the quality abruptly dropped off. Just inking this one small thing was such a struggle despite the fact that it was a brand new pen. Maybe I'll go back to Rapidographs, but they were always so much work to maintain and I'm such a slob. The really important line work comes at the end and is done with a brush so maybe I'd be just as happy with some crappy Pilot pen or something.

Anyway, sorry this entry was light on the art and big on the chatter. Romania was so awesome and relevant to the kind of art I like to look at at make though so...deal with it!

The Ice Age Is Coming, The Sun's Zooming In

2010-11-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

Hey hey. Last blog post before I leave for Romania this Friday. This was a commission from one of my favorite people ever to be given to a friend of hers for a baby shower. Her friend is Greek and she thought she might like something with a pomegranate in it. The pomegranate features very heavily in the myth of Persephone who was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the underworld. After her mother Demeter implored Zeus to intervene he ruled that she could leave the underworld as long as she hadn't eaten any food while there. Because she had eaten several seeds from a Pomegranate she was forced to stay in hell for as many months as seeds she had eaten (the number varies). Her mother Demeter who is the goddess of the harvest spends these months in mourning and allows nothing to grow on the earth, explaining the seasons. Persephone is a chthonic deity and there were a series of mystery cults devoted to her and several myths featuring her, such as the one where she allows Orpheus to bring his wife Eurydice out from the underworld after he plays a song sad enough to make her cry (a myth with probably THE saltiest ending in all of mythology). Anyway, I didn't have much time for this commission and didn't want to make it inappropriately creepy for a baby shower so it's a reduction of the myth. I had originally planned on buying a pomegranate to draw from life but you know what? They're kind of the worst! Just seeds with a little bit of delicious goo. And I don't like wasting food!:
I also realized recently that I never post pictures of things framed. I almost always use found vintage frames from flea markets and some sent to me by my aunt because I prefer ones with weird shapes like ovals and circles which aren't really popular anymore. My last show all of the frames were gold. I used one of the leftovers for this:
And here's the back with the fancy paper on it:
Another thing I had in mind while working on this with the cycle of the seasons and death and rebirth of plants that I think is interesting in its own right is the tradition of vanitas paintings. It was a european theme in painting in the 16th and 17th centuries that expressed the fleeting nature of life and how unimportant the vanity of human experience is. Death is symbolized by skulls, rotting fruit and dying flowers, hour glasses and bubbles, and vanity by instruments and gold and jewels. These sorts of paintings were often done by women who were denied the opportunity to study from live human models at the time, and could express themselves conceptually with these still-lifes. It's also related to the themes of Danse Macabre and Momento Mori. Here are some:
Anyway, I'm pretty overwhelmed right now. Just back from a Philly-Chicago flight and a Chicago-Philly drive (ugh Illinois, Indiana and Ohio are so boring to drive through) I did to help Mike with his art handler job (it was also his birthday sooo Chicago diner and a Watain show while we were in there!), and now I work for a couple days straight and go straight from work to the airport for Romania Friday. SEE YA.

Autumn's Cold Brings The Pagan Dead Who Seek The Warmth Of The Samhain Fire

2010-10-28T07:42:00.001-07:00

Last night I finally got around to picking up some turnips to make myself some traditional Samhnag, carved turnip lanterns for Samhain. I will say that carving a turnip wasn't as hard as I feared after getting started but I can imagine the Irish were ecstatic to find pumpkins in America, as turnips are solid and much harder to hollow and much smaller (mine are of course on the smaller side because they're ...shop rite turnips). I think they come out looking really neat though, because the purple shows through in a really neat way when they're illuminated.
I had read that the pungent smell of turnip as you carve was supposed to mimic the smell of putrefaction and death. It definitely stunk up the whole house but smelled more like radish to me. Hopefully with these hung in the tree out back I will be safe from the creeping spirits of the dead as the veil between the worlds is lifted!

I also did a little experiment with painting on bone this week. I have some whale bones (salvaged by myself from a rotting whale in maine!) that I've been wanting to try painting on and my upcoming Sea Monster themed show seemed like the perfect time so I wanted to experiment on some random bones I had lying around first. I can't remember where I got these deer mandibles but they were in sort of scuzzy shape (a faint bit of fur still visible in places!) so I did a lot of sanding to prepare one and coated it in a gloss spray enamel to try to even out the painting surface. It's astounding how the slightest texture or bump can mess up a tiny detailed line. I sprayed gloss enamel between color layers too because I remember reading that the key to Russian lacquer work was doing this, so that the colors appeared to be floating above each other. Not sure that's exactly what I accomplished but I think the enamel gave the colors a pretty cool clarity. I'm probably going to give this one as a gift and have some ideas for the other:

In other news I finally got around to posting a mix on my friend Jeff's mix blog. It's a pared down best of of a much much longer running collection of witch themed songs Mike and I have been working on for a long time. This is the first time I've ever attempted to share music on the internet (last time I made a mix tape it was actually a tape, REALLY!) so hopefully I did it right. Click the title to download. Happy Halloween!:

all of them witches
the trial-exorcist
come to the sabbat-black widow
white witch of rose hall- coven
suspiria-goblin
queen of bees- witchcraft
the witch-the rattles
season of the witch-donovan
baba yaga- the pagans
you must be a witch-the lollipop shop
wicked old witch- john fogarty
the witch- the sonics
witchfinder general- witchfinder general
angel witch- angel witch
burn witch burn- morticia
burning witches- warlock
bewitched- candelmass
witchcult today- electric wizard
tres brujas- the sword
death by bewitchment- exorcist
don't burn the witch- venom
witch ghetto- darkthrone
a witch is born- gehenna
the witches reel- Vincent Price

What Is This That Stands Before Me? Figure In Black Which Points At Me

2010-10-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

Once again, I've been absent because it's fall and that's the time I most want to be outside doing things. Last weekend I went to the Keene, NH pumpkin festival which is a totally over the top Wicker Man type celebration with a HUGE towers and racks and racks of jack-o-lanterns (the official count this year was 22,949).
Annnnyyyywayyyyy what I've been working on is the aforementioned Video Violence group show which will be on display during Exhumed Film's 24 Hour Horror-thon next week. The idea was to redesign or alter packaging from a cult vhs video and I chose Haxan. I opted to make a completely new package. Haxan is amazing for so many reasons. It's silent and came out in 1922 but is way ahead of its time in terms of subject matter and has some of the coolest most brilliantly stylized effects. In addition to having tons of really cool (and at the time shocking) imagery related to European witchcraft at it's heart the message is a warning against religious hysteria and superstition and presents a case for scientific thought and reason. So best of both worlds really! I recommend the Criterion version which has the original film with its score and a later edited down version called "Witchcraft Through the Ages" with a jazz score and narration by William Burroughs (this is actually the version that my video is).

The idea for me was to design something that looked like the kind of case a film that came out in 1922 would come in (not to get all steampunk on you) and to make something that looks like a grimoire. I found a wooden jewelry box that was shaped like a book at a craft store (where I actually find tons of cool wooden objects like the crosses from my show).
I hacked the drawer off the "spine" and cut a piece to put inside so the video would rest flush with the spine when it was in the box and then stained it and did the painting directly on the wood. Here are a billion pictures:

The picture on the tape is actually salvaged from the original box. The closures are some velvet strips which attach over the spine with velcro, and the spine can be removed to access the vhs inside. Overall, I'm really excited how it came out though it's maybe embarassingly over the top. Painting directly on wood was a little tricky but I just kind of worked through it and accepted that it might not look perfect. Anyway Watch Haxan, and go check out the show!

Exhumed Films 24 Hour Horror-Thon @ The International House

3701 Chestnut St

Philadelphia, PA

P.S.- R.I.P. Ari Up

Dissolving Into Gray Interview With Michael Bukowski

2010-10-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

http://dissolvingintogray.blogspot.com/2010/10/interview-with-illustrator-mike.html

Hey remember the interview my friend Denis did with me last month? This month he interviewed one of my favorite creeps in the world, Mike (aka Michael Bukowski), about his upcoming art show and work, telling Michael Graves to f off, being a life long weirdo, travel etc. Read it!

PS- that's mikes MADBALL collection behind him. It's great!

To Walk The Night, To Forever Roam

2010-10-04T07:02:00.000-07:00

So, I know I've been posting less lately, and that's because I'm working at a less feverish pace and enjoying my favorite season. This weekend was amazing. There was the Hallowed Halloween group show at Proximity which mike had an amazing piece in, the Birth Noise/Cat Vet/Trophy Wife/Zombie Dogs show, the Russian Cultural Festival, and the Shoppers/Pink Coffins/Straightjacket Nation show (with bonus backyard bonfire). Also I met a cool rat and it peed on me.

The one project I did finish this past week was the header for The Living Doorway. I'm really into how it came out and it was really fun to paint at a reasonable pace and not have my eyes cross after like 12 hours straight of painting one thing.
Jaime had asked for a "satanic goat horned vulture" so I had no problem staying inspired. Note the little demon signatures on the skulls because I'm a dweeb. I'll never get tired of drawing that smoke junk....

Next up is the Haxan box for the Video Violence show. I did a lot of hacksawing and sanding and I have the wooden book/box ready to go. Just working out the design of the illustration itself.

In other news my show comes down Thursday evening so we can hang Mike's new show!:
Monster Manual and D&D toy inspired weirdness. As the person who is privy to his work in every stage I can say that this show will be really fucking cool and you shouldn't miss it if you're anywhere in the area!

I sold everything but three pieces from my show and a number of prints which I just sent off to be printed and the awesome news is that the money I made from the show almost completely pays for....my trip to ROMANIA this fall (where I will no doubt learn about spooky new shit to come home and paint about). Romania, home of Transylvania, the Carpathian mountains, the painted churches, the Borgo Pass, like 20 different castles the Vlad Tepes set foot in once that claim to be "Dracula's Castle", the Merry Cemetery , wolves, bears etc etc etc. Mike and I leave in mid-november and we'll have about ten days. I'm currently learning how to count in Romanian and hopefully will work my way up to the necessary pleasantries and pleas for vegetarian food. I'll be smuggling home a coffin full of Transylvanian soil and plague rats if anyone is interested...

Finally, I've been meaning to mention this for a while and this seems like a good time: you should really be reading Destroying Angels if you like outsider, punk and metal art. It's definitely one of those zines that was exactly what I was looking for when my awesome friend Ned lent me his back issues. Tons of interviews with people with an awesome perspective on making art that's based on a real love of the subject matter and a genuine passion for what they do. Lots of artists I've admired for years as well as a few I didn't know about, or whose work I had seen and liked but never known much about. The tenth issue just got reprinted and you should definitely grab it while you can. 3D cover, awesome interviews! Maybe you're lucky and you also have a cool friend like Ned who has the back issues too.

Enough already!!!!

Laurel Hill

2010-09-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

Hey, remember this painting I made in April? Well it was selected to be published in the Laurel Hill 175 years of reflections book! COOL.

Der Hexenhammer

2010-09-19T06:21:00.000-07:00

I guess I should update! My show went really really well. Lots of people showed up despite a bunch of conflicting events (most people found a way to go to everything which is awesome), I sold a lot of stuff, and people seemed into it. I definitely think I outdid my last show and managed to keep everything consistent in terms of quality and style and theme since I had a smaller space to fill. My friends and family were all so awesome, helping me hang and photograph work, helping me make frames, baking Russian tea cookies for the opening (!) and telling people about the show and coming from out of town. Everyone is great, especially me. Just kidding.

Possibly one of my worst work habits is my desire to rest endlessly on my laurels. I have absolutely no trouble convincing myself that I deserve breaks and rewards for sometimes the most basic of tasks (going to the post office, cleaning the litterbox, writing a long email) so I worked through it to jump into the next thing since it turns out I actually still have tons of stuff to do. Here's the line drawing for a blog header I'm making for a friend's blog:
I went COMPLETELY overboard here, but it's mostly because I liked his idea so much. A satanic goat-horned vulture? OK. It's pretty muddled to look at at this stage but that's a dove he's tearing apart. This will probably take a while to finish since I insisted on putting so much tiny junk in it but I've already got a good start (background is painted).

I was also invited to participate in the art show that corresponds with Exhumed Film's 24 hour Halloween Marathon. It's called Video Violence and the idea is to alter or repackage a favorite cult movie VHS to be displayed on a shelf as part of a mock video store. I love this idea, as one of the last cavepeople to still own and watch (and BUY) vhs tapes and being the right age to have come up during the advent of vhs, with strong memories of some of my favorite video stores and all the weird and awesome movies I found there. I had a million ideas for this but I'm pretty sure I'll be doing Haxan and designing a fake spellbook box for it. Haxan might not exactly qualify as "cult", as it falls somewhere between "classic" and "holy shit, someone made this weird old thing?!?" but I'm really in the mood to do something witchy and I actually really enjoy the message of the movie and all of the imagery.

Since I decided to start actually trying with art a couple years ago I made the decision to take every possible opportunity to be in group shows and to NEVER FLAKE (ps- this is my second bad work habit/personal habit and one that I have almost totally eliminated from my work. Not so much for the personal). Last year the Exhumed show was the only thing I flaked on and it still eats at me. The idea was to screenprint a poster for a fake grindhouse movie. I love the idea and I actually drew the entire poster but totally failed when it came time to print and I discovered that the screenprinting studio in my basement was busted in the middle of a prolonged winter illness delirium. I basically put my hands up and said "fuck it!" Here's the poster I drew for that show, for my fictional movie called "Devil Mummy"
Looking at it now there are of course a million things I would change but I still think it would probably have been cool if I finished it. I'm partly writing all this here to make flaking this year totally shameful and impossible. Mark my words, etc etc.

The Haunted Woods Where Hoofed Feet Swagger

2010-09-10T06:50:00.000-07:00

Here are some scans of some smaller pieces I did last week plus a scan of the flier image since I only posted a photo before. I also have some scans of the three "terrible vengeance" paintings I posted in their frames that I'll probably post later.

This guy is the bolotnik, a swamp spirit that, like every water spirit in virtually all folklore, will drown you.
This is just a small painting. Forests are full of scary stuff!
This is a witch's coffin. I was really interested in that fascination with "unclean" death that was explored a little with the corpses popping out of the ground in "A Terrible Vengeance", and is essentially the source of European Vampire Lore. Russian folklore is full of horrible reanimated corpses, people who died prematurely or without passing on their arcane knowledge. Witches and sorcerers could pass their knowledge on to unsuspecting bystanders at their death bed with just a touch or word and escape the fate of the walking dead. If they died "ensorceled" their coffin would be rejected by the good earth and they would become the walking dead, sometimes reanimated by demons who would wear their flayed skin. These revenants were also known to come back and devour their remaining family. They were sometimes preventatively staked with an aspen stake through the heart.
This is a moth, which was the form that nightmares and the souls of sleeping people would take. I really like moths that have a natural false eye pattern.
And this is the piece for my flier based on St. John's Eve, already posted but here's a nice clean scan.

Show is hung, opening tonight!

Oh No! Vertigo!

2010-09-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

Show is finished! Wanna see something gross? This is the callous on my middle finger from holding a brush:
I'm sure if I wasn't booted out of Catholic school at such an early age they would have cured me of my sinful and incorrect pencil grip but as it is I've always written and painted with a weird death-grip and the implement positioned almost at the end of my middle finger. The brushes rest right under that callous and when I work for a few hours I end up with a huge indent there. Grossssssss.

Last night I finished putting backing and hangers on everything for my show. Here are the backs of everything that i made look nice because I'm nuts:
An aside: immediately after I finished getting all this together and packing it in boxes for my friend to take to Benna's tomorrow, my roomate's dog slipped out the door by my feet and BOLTED several blocks. If you were wondering what the physical effects of sitting on your ass for several months painting beard hairs are I can tell you they definitely include not being able to run 5 blocks after a demented pomeranian. Luckily a neighbor hopped off his porch to help me and Kat jumped out of her car and ran the rest of the way with me and grabbed him out of the back of the corner store that he apparently decided was his new home (more snacks, lottery tickets, understandable).

Anyway, here are some photographs of framed stuff. The first three are frames that Josh Robeson made. We talked about working out a way for me to have glassless frames I could assemble around the art and for these particular paintings I wanted something with a rounded top so he cut all the pieces for me. Originally the plan was the hide the seams with some putty after the art had been glued in but I couldn't find a good brush-able gold paint so I had to paint the frame pieces ahead of time and couldn't close the seams. They really don't bother me at all though and I actually like the way the grain switches directions when you look up close. This is how I'm hoping to frame everything in the future.

My friend Ryann shot really nice lightbox photos of the crosses I posted a crappy picture of a while ago. Because the actual paintings make sort of pathetic scans because of their size, and because I'm having so much trouble getting scans that show the actual color of things I was really excited to see what a good job she did capturing the color accurately and the tiny detail (probably worth a click to see up close)

Tomorrow I'll post the scans I have of other stuff. I did about 4 small paintings last week that I haven't posted in any form yet. Show is friday. Hanging it tonight and tomorrow I'm hoping to relax, eat food and fucking GO OUTSIDE already.

Can't You See The Witch By My Side?

2010-09-08T20:48:00.000-07:00

My friend Denis has a blog I mentioned a while ago where he does interviews with friends about their projects and two weeks ago he interviewed me. It's pretty flattering to have someone actually care enough about what you do and what you think to want to ask about it and a little daunting to know they'll be recording it. Hopefully I wasn't too incoherant. He also took a couple of pictures of me in my studio (probably should have washed my hair). It will also be cross-posted later on nevernothing.com

Tomorrow morning I'll be posting new photos of pieces and Friday I'll be posting scans of the rest of the work. As of a few hours ago that shit is done!

Gimme Siren, Child and Do You Hear Me?

2010-08-30T05:28:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I finished what will probably be the last of the medium sized (this is a loose term, medium is pretty small for me) paintings for my show. It's a Sirin, or maybe an Alkonost, Russian half bird women, not unlike Greek Sirens. The image appears very often in embroidery and paintings and was later appropriated into Russian Orthodox iconography. The descriptions range a lot and I think that's probably because of the fact that the lore has changed as it moved from pagan to christian beliefs. Here are a few excerpts about them:

"These half-women half-birds are directly based on the Greek myths and later folklore about sirins.They were usually portrayed wearing a crown or with a nimbus. Sirins sang beautiful songs to the saints, foretelling future joys. For mortals, however, the birds were dangerous. Men who heard them would forget everything on earth, follow them, and ultimately die. People would attempt to save themselves from Sirins by shooting cannons, ringing bells and making other loud noises to scare the bird off."

"The Alkonost is described as having an upper half in the shape of a young woman and the lower half in the shape of a huge bird. She has a counterpart known as the Sirin and is said to be one of th hosts that lives in the land of the dead called Rai. Her task is to torment the souls of the damned by wailing her fearful songs and giving eternal punishment"

My painting is actually a fairly traditional representation:
The headpiece she's wearing in my painting is a kokoshnik , a traditional Russian headdress. There are hundreds of different kinds and they're all really cool. I recommend a google image search. A related note, the headdress usually included a cap on the back to hold the woman's hair, because as in many cultures, loose hair was a sign of loose morality and an invitation to evil. This is why female evil spirits are all described as having loose, or unbraided hair. The bells in the background are a reference to people using them and other loud noises to scare off Sirins.
As usual the real color lies somewhere between the scan and the photograph. I used metallic gold paint which really doesn't scan correctly. Whatever. I'm tired.

In other news, since I know a lot of people who read my blog listen to metal and weird shit I'm just going to suggest you check out Sal's records . Tons of good stuff he is very sadly selling after being denied student loans (after a bazillion years of hard work). He's an awesome guy with cool records so maybe you could bid on something? Pretty sure he'll be adding more too.

Also after a lot of pestering on my part my friend Ryann finally made a website for her work. She does amazing creepy stuff that's nearly impossible to capture in a photograph as it is screenprinted layers of glass over top of photographs. People standing in bleak apocalyptic landscapes. Super cool, and grim. Check out Ryann's website and see her awesome work!

Come, Come, Come to the Sabbat

2010-08-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

First things first, here's the flyer for my show! It is the result of a frustrated few hours of photoshop on my part. I realized I'd been talking about this show and providing no details for anyone reading who's actually interested in going so there it is. It'll be my second solo show and I'm pretty excited and definitely learned a lot about how I'd like to do things since the first one. I'm still frustrated by the fact that some of my ambitions get so scaled back by a reasonable understanding of my time constraints but I think this one will be cool.

The image is obviously the one I posted a little teaser of last week:
"Behold! The tiny flower bud crimsons and moves as though alive. It is a marvel, in truth. It moves and grows larger and larger, and flashes like a burning coal. The tiny star flashes up; something bursts softly, and the flower opens before his eyes like a flame, lighting the others about it. "Now is the time," thought Petru, and extended his hand. He sees hundreds of shaggy hands reach from behind him, also for the flower."

The color is really off in this photograph (the flyer with its adjustments is probably closer) and as you can see it's an odd shape. I'm putting it in a really cool octagonal frame my aunt gave me. The image is from the story St. John's Eve by Nikolai Gogol which I mentioned previously. St. John's Eve was the inspiration for the tone poem Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky, about a witches sabbath. The story starts pretty slowly like a lot of Gogol's work with a lot of longwinded exposition in the tradition of oral storytelling, and then suddenly erupts into a really bizarre nightmare. It's essentially a story about the devil leading a poor peasant astray and presenting him with a way to gain treasure (and the hand of a rich girl he is courting) through supernatural means. Predictably this does not work to his benefit. There's a central scene where he is led up the mountain at night and told to wait for the blossoming of one special flower which he has to pick in order to summon a witch who will tell him how to find the treasure, and as he reaches for it he can hear other supernatural creatures scurrying to grab it first. As usual Gogol takes reference from folklore without referring to specific creatures and tales which I like a lot. There are countless stories about contact with the devil traveling in human form and the repercussions of accepting gifts from him (a necklace that burns your neck, a ribbon that makes your hair fall out), and the story contains a lot of imagery from stories about witches (shapeshifting, the house on chicken legs usually seen in Baba Yaga stories, communion with the devil, sabbaths on treeless mountains). I also stumbled across a reference to the raskovnik, a magical plant that could supposedly be used to find treasure, which I imagine was the inspiration for the flower in the story. You can read the story in full here and I definitely recommend it. The reason I keep doing images from Gogol's stories is because each one has several moments that are so graphically interesting because of his description that I immediately want to draw them.

Another thing of slight interest about that painting is that that is the second background I did. My aunt recently asked me if serendipity ever came into play when I was painting something and I answered no as I was working on the original background for this, and ended up being very wrong. Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I am the LEAST personally meticulous person they know. I live and have always lived in a perpetual whirlwind of clutter. My socks never match, my hair isn't brushed, and nearly everything I own is MacGyvered in some way because it doesn't really work. But god fucking forbid I see streaks in my paintings! I had done a blue to black faded background and no matter what I did I could not get it to stop looking streaky. I'm guessing it had something to do with the opacity of the particular blue paint I was using. I had one final spazz about it after seeing it under fluorescent light and painted a black sky over everything and left the original blue for mountains so it wouldn't be too boring. The end result is actually way better than what I originally planned.

Also the flower I used as reference was a zinnia, which is pretty regionally inaccurate and not too mystical considering everyone's grandma has them in the garden. Not being a gardening person I will admit to doing a google search for "red flower" and picking that one because of the way the petals were unfurling, and assumed no one would think about what it was. However my two aunts and mother saw it and immediately asked "why a zinnia"? Soooo trust that that is not just a zinnia, but rather a magical Slavic witch flower.

In other news I'm as always prematurely excited about Halloween. Allen lent me "Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween" and I've been reading it whenever I get a chance. It's great! This year I will be attempting to carve the pre-pumpkin traditional turnip lantern. I have no idea where a girl goes about getting a sizable turnip in Philadelphia.

Just Leave Your Flowers By the Door

2010-08-18T06:40:00.000-07:00

Working as always. While away I got the skeleton above to a nearly finished point (lots of outlining to do but that's it), and got started on a painting I'll be making into the flyer for my show. I actually ran into a few problems with it, but I think the end result is better than what I had planned. I'll get into that more when I post it finished, but here's a part of it for now:
Maine was great of course. While there I found some flowers i first noticed two years ago after a really rainy summer on a nature trail down the street from my grandfathers house. It is Monotropa uniflora (aka Ghost Plant, Corpse Plant and Indian Pipe) a colorless bizarre looking parasitic flower. Double parasitic actually, because it gets nutrients from root fungus which get nutrients from tree roots. I desperately tried to find some evidence of it growing in Eastern Europe somewhere so I could work it into a painting for my show but no luck (I will discuss the total regional inaccuracy of the flower above at a later time). It actually seems to be pretty hard to find so it's kind of amazing that I've found such an abundance of it in Chamberlain, ME. I'm definitely going to work these into a painting soon.
"Colorless in every part, waxy, cold, and clammy, Indian pipes rise like a company of wraiths in the dim forest that suits them well. Ghoulish parasites, uncanny saprophytes, for their matted roots prey either on the juices of living plants or on the decaying matter of dead ones, how weirdly beautiful and decorative they are!...Yet to one who can read the faces of flowers, as it were, it stands a branded sinner. Doubtless its ancestors were industrious, honest creatures, seeking their food in the soil, and digesting it with the help of leaves filled with good green matter (chlorophyll) on which virtuous vegetable life depends; but some ancestral knave elected to live by piracy, to drain the already digested food of its neighbors; so the Indian pipe gradually lost the use of parts for which it had need no longer, until we find it to-day without color and its leaves degenerated into mere scaly bracts...No wonder this degenerate hangs its head; no wonder it grows black with shame on being picked, as if its wickedness were only just then discovered! To think that a plant related on one side to many of the loveliest flowers in Nature's garden - the azaleas, laurels, rhododendrons, and the bonny heather - and on the other side to the modest but no less charming wintergreen tribe, should have fallen from grace to such a depth! Its scientific name, meaning a flower once turned, describes it during only a part of its career. When the minute, innumerable seeds begin to form, it proudly raises its head erect, as if conscious that it had performed the one righteous act of its life."

I See a Rainbow, All in Black

2010-08-05T15:00:00.000-07:00

Working on the last of those three dudes. I'm way past the point I was at when I took this photo, but I thought I'd post it as it shows one of my least favorite steps, filling in the background around all the little bits. Because I don't want the paint to build a bunch of texture I do everything in sections and try to avoid overlap. Bleh. What's wrong with me?

Along the same lines I ummm appear to have been hoarding frames. Initially these were all for this show but I ended up using those crosses and having Josh make a couple so now I just have a lifetime's worth of gold frames. All found at flea markets, on the curb, or donated from my aunt. Most of them for $1-$3!
Tomorrow I leave for Maine for a week of living my ideal life: days running around in the woods and messing around by the ocean and nights painting monsters and creeping around in the fog like the Wolfman with Mike. No cell phone, no internet. Just this:
See ya, chumps!

Nothing Like an August Night

2010-08-02T06:33:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update. I finished this guy last week. I made this little image so you can see it in each stage. (click if you're interest in seeing it bigger-blog reformats everything so small!).

I had to take a little weekend trip so I'm basically in a constant state of anxiety about getting everything done for my show. For some strange reason my paintings have been shrinking and shrinking because I've been getting into doing smaller and smaller detail so it's going to be a real challenge to fill the space. I think the first step would be buying some average size brushes and just trying to scale what I'm doing up to knock out a few medium size pieces. I can't really think where to get more time from at this point unless I stop sleeping? Whatever, there are worse things. Bleh.

In the Night When the Wolves Cry Out

2010-07-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

Hey remember those line drawings from my last post? Here's one finished and one nearly finished. As you can see basically everything that could possibly be interesting to look at happens at the painting stage. I really do treat the line drawing like a coloring book and go from there.
This finished one is the first of the series and is actually pretty small. maybe a good 8 in tall? The second one is probably around 10 in.
I'm including these pictures so you can see what stuff looks like before I put the outline back in. It looks sort of interesting to me and all the value and rendering is there but for some reason there is this compulsive anal retentive part of me that is expressed absolutely nowhere else in my chaotic messy life that insists on and takes great pleasure in bounding it all back up in tons of black line work. There are some parts that I think look really cool un-outlined though, and I sometimes toy with the idea of doing some colored line work instead of always resorting to black though I am probably more influenced by comic books (especially EC) than even I am aware of and will always have a great love for interesting black linework.

I've been rewatching the X-files for the first time since it originally aired while working the past few weeks. I'm actually pretty impressed and entertained. Oh also I watched Wendy O Williams and the Plasmatics: 10 years of Revolutionary Rock and Roll yesterday and it was excellent. I recommend it.

The Unquiet Grave

2010-07-13T11:11:00.001-07:00

Sooooo against my better judgment and in the interest of keeping this blog active I decided to post some process pictures. It weirds me out to look at and display stuff at this state because I always have an idea in my head of what it will look like completed and these seem so sad and boring in comparison. Basically I draw in pencil and then lay ink with rapidographs To make myself what amounts to a coloring book image. Occasionally I'll throw a few directional marks or some hatching in there if I'm worried I'll forget how something should be rendered when it comes time to paint but I mostly leave the areas as open as possible. When I lay the initial layer of paint where the lines are I let it cover them if I can still make them out or if it's a darker paint I try to go around and leave myself little crescents of white paper so I can find my place. As you can imagine that's particularly maddening to do places where there are hundreds of tiny lines and since I like drawing piles of hair and feathers and scales that's usually 20-50% of the image.I decided to start "drawing ahead" by sitting down for a day to draw and ink a couple of pieces so that there will always be something to go right into painting after I finish one. These three go together and are progressively bigger and grosser. They're taken from a Gogol story where a journey down a river to a sorcerer's castle takes the protagonists past a grave yard where one corpse after another springs from the grave, each one more dessicated than the last with longer nails and beard, all screaming for air. I had read some stuff about the unclean dead being literally rejected from the "good earth", and the coffins of sorcerers and suicides popping back out of the ground and rejecting attempts at reburial. I'm pretty sure Gogol was drawing from something like that.
I started the background for the first one but I have faaaaar to go before anything is finished. You can't really tell in the last picture but I have a LOT of hair to render.

In other news I've been reading a lot of cool old Scottish, Irish and British Ballads and getting ideas for other pieces and I've been thinking about making a return to embroidery. I found glow-in-the-dark embroidery floss online. Think how many ghosts and skeletons I can stitch with that! My friend Ned and I have also been chatting about an October zine. Something reprinting obscure Weird Tales interviews and short stories illustrated by yours truly. Never enough time!!!

Fangs in the Day's Moonlight

2010-07-07T11:43:00.000-07:00

I finished the crosses! Well, I have two more blanks but composing in this shape is so hard and restrictive I settled on just doing 6 of them. I'm posting these less detailed pictures for the time being and then passing them off to my friend Ryann to be photographed well (I'll post good photographs after my show). I haven't talked about the theme of these (and my show in general it turns out so I thought I would a little here.

For starters, I really like folklore (and mythology and antiquated occult stuff). I landed on Slavic folklore for this show for no very particular reason other than that I had read a lot of it, and had been looking at Russian and Ukrainian folk art and had seen a lot of aesthetic similarities to what I like to do in the bright colors, tiny detail work, the flat stylized lines of icon paintings and decorative boxes and jewelry. In reading a bit further I was predictably drawn to what are referred to as "unclean" forces, elements, and places in folklore. Places of danger, natural forces which are understandably terrifying especially outside of the comfortable modern urban world I live in, and strange creatures abound in these stories. Despite the introduction of Christianity these ideas and fears were not abandoned and I even read a passage about the complete distrust the Russian peasants had in the ability of God and Jesus to protect them from all these unclean forces and "the devil".

"Unclean" places are places that are confusing and dangerous or uncharted. Dark woods, deep water etc. "Unclean" creatures exist in these places and exist to do harm to people, getting them lost, drowning them in water, tricking them. Sorcerers and Witches were capable of existing in this world and doing harm as were the dead/undead who died "unclean" deaths through foul play, suicide or by dying young and unbaptized or sorcerers who failed to pass on their knowledge before death. A sign of the unclean world was inversion. For example the world was reflected upside down in the eyes of a witch, one would walk backwards to confuse predatory forest monsters etc. So these crosses are inverted icons with images of unclean forces. Additionally "inverted" is the only orientation I would use for the cross, for personal reasons, haha. The theme of the show is shaping up to be encounters with unclean forces in Slavic folklore and literature.

From the top left:

The Wolf- is an animal associated with unclean forces and the form that malicious shape-shifting sorcerers and forest spirits often took.

The Dragon- was often found by dangerous lakes and rivers where people were likely to drown

The Magpie- is a shape commonly taken by shape-shifting witches. There is an "historical" folk tale about Ivan the Terrible attempting to burn a group of witches in a town square only to have them all turn into magpies and fly away to escape the flames

The Leshii- is a spirit of the forest which leads men astray in the woods by calling to them in a familiar voice. He may also tickle them to death (seriously, what?)

Viy- I discussed here

The Devil's Carriage Horse- because of the unclean nature of death by suicide it is said that the devil's carriage is drawn by suicides. There are also several malicious water spirits which are supposed to have been human suicides.

Anyway, that's the first wall of my show finished. Next I'm going to work on three moderate sized pieces from a Nikolai Gogol story called "A Terrible Vengeance" and a piece from another story called "St John's Eve" which you can read in full here. It's actually the basis for the composition Night on Bald Mountain (familiarized by Disney's Fantasia).

I'm also in the middle of moving during a heat wave so I'm cranky and struggling to remain productive. And I keep getting the intro to this stuck in my head.

In other news Mike has a new blog where he's posting a drawing a day of Lovecraft creatures. Check it out, it's really cool! Here's a flying polyp: