Salt The Dead, You Close The Veil

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

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.