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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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.