7.14.2011

The Eye From Outer Space

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.

3 comments:

Amy Duncan said...

this egg rules jeanne! and I'm pretty stoked that it's made of wood because that means there may be some chance that I could buy it from you and it wouldn't get flattened in the mail...that's if you're selling it?

that dover forest book looks great too, bless that company. I might have to get that.

Heiner N. T. said...

really nice egg.

Alina Albert said...
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