Light From Out The Lurid Sea

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.