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.

In the Night When the Wolves Cry Out

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

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

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. 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:

Beyond the Five Known Senses

First of all, here's something from last year that just came my way! It's the Pangolin (what in the world is a pangolin? find out!) painting I did for the "Inside Out" show I had last March. I actually didn't get a chance to scan or photograph this before the show but luckily it went to one of my best friends, Jeff ,who sent me this photograph this week. It's nice the see the weirdo again. A cool thing about this painting is that it has tons of iridescent detail work that pretty much...no one will see except for maybe Jeff.

I figured that since I have a little downtime I'd talk about supplies for a second, in case anyone is actually curious haha. All of my paintings are done on bristol vellum almost always exclusively with brushes. Since I work so small I basically stick to very small detail brushes though I do have a few (still small) moderate sized ones. After much searching the best and tiniest seem to be these:
Loew-Cornell 18/0 Round and Spotter. The short squat handles offer a really good grip and the points are suprisingly versatile.
so teeny tiny!

At this point I primarily use three kinds of ink. The first two I appreciate mainly for their vivid and concentrated color:
They're both very watery and fluid but the color is so concentrated that it isn't much of an issue. The fluidity makes it really easy to get a nice continuous line. The Liquitex has a very slight gloss to it which irritates me because I like for everything to be totally matte, but the colors are really good and can be great for mixing with thicker paint. The absolute most essential and recommended ink/paint I use though is this:
I first bought a jar of black Pelikan Plaka in college, mistaking it for a basic ink. It's actually a highly opaque casein emulsion paint, which dries perfectly matte. I can say with some certainty that their black is the BLACKEST BLACK I've ever found, and has none of the iridescent qualities of other black inks. While the black and often the white are pretty easy to find in most art supply stores in the U.S. , I've only ever found a full selection of the colors at one place. In addition to all these I have no qualms with using any kind of water-based paint, from cheap acrylics or gouache, to craft store 35 cent paints, to flourescent and glow in the dark tshirt paints. I also occasionally use these koh-i-noor watercolors for backgrounds:
Annnnnyway, if you survived all that shop talk, I also wanted to mention the H.P. Podcraft H.P. Lovecraft literary podcast that Mike and I have been listening to. I highly recommend it! They love Lovecraft but have no problem poking fun at him and critiquing his work and offer a lot of interesting context and background for his stories and ideas. Haha of course it doesn't hurt that they also reference Suicidal Tendencies and Futurama. ALSO, I just listened to their podcast about The Chronicles of Dr. Herbert West (featuring Stuart Gordon as guest commentator) and was startled when they made the same connection I did in my post about the Women record cover , between the experiments with transplanted dog heads and Herbert West. Excellent! I just wish there was one of these for Robert E. Howards work.

Just slugging along doing work for my show! At some point I need to write up a little bio for here, and one for a hang tag for the shirt I did for my friend Carol's store. I don't know how to talk about myself in the third person without wanting to vomit though.

Oh and hey, if you live in philly, check out the Exhumed Films Ozploitation double feature this friday. Road Games and Patrick!

The Spirit of Evil

Completed my second piece for the show. I know I said I wasn't going to post EVERYTHING but it's hard sometimes, especially since I'm trying to keep this blog active. Anyway, as I said before this is based on the short story Viy by Nikolai Gogol. Here's a little synopsis of the particular part that inspired this, just because it's so cool:

"On the first night, when the Cossacks take her body to a ruined church, he is somewhat frightened but calms himself when he lights more candles in the church to eliminate most of the darkness, other than that above him. As he begins to say prayers, he imagines to himself that the corpse is getting up, but it never does. Suddenly, however, he looks up and finds that the witch is sitting up in her coffin. She begins to walk around, reaching out for someone, and starts to approach to Khoma, but he draws a circle of protection around himself that she cannot cross. She gnashes her teeth at him as he begins to exorcise her, and then she goes into her coffin and flies about the church in it, trying to frighten him out of the circle. Dawn arrives, and he has survived the first night.

The next night similar events occur, but more horrible than before, and the witch calls upon unseen, winged demons and monsters to fly about outside the church. When the Cossacks find the philosopher in the morning, he is near death, pale and leaning against a wall. He tries to escape the next day but is captured and brought back to finish.

On the third night the witch’s corpse is even more terrifying and she calls the demons and monsters around her to bring Viy into the church, who can see everything. Khoma realizes that he cannot look at the creature when they draw his long eyelids up from the floor so he can see, but he does anyway and sees a horrible, iron face staring at him. Viy points in his direction and the monsters leap upon him. Khoma is dead from horror. However, they miss the first crowing of the rooster and are unable to escape the church when day begins."

Basically a priest is asked to sit a vigil with a dead witch for three nights and each night she terrorizes him. The characteristics of Viy himself are actually based on Russian beliefs surrounding St. John Cassian who was depicted with eyebrows down to his knees which he lifted once a year (on his feast day) to cast an evil eye on the whole world. I really like the way Christianity was sort of folded into traditional folk beliefs in Russia (though I would naturally prefer it if Christianity was never imposed at all!) with a lot of borrowing and integration and a complete disinterest in abandoning superstition and supernatural beliefs. Really neat. Here are two close ups:
I will say that composing in an inverted cross shape is incredibly stupid and challenging. I have another one planned that should work really well but I don't know if I'll be able to get through all eight.

In other news please check out this interview Denis did with Melissa Farley who is one of the most talented photographers I know!

Draw Not Your Bow Till Your Arrow is Fixed

I do all my spray painting in our basement, which is also a screenprinting studio, with no concern for the state of the floors (rented property, total scum landlord). My roomate took this picture of the aftermath of the gold painted crosses i made for my upcoming show and it delights me.
The "2010" below is from a sign I made for the fake photobooth at my friends' new years party.

Right now I'm working on a second cross with an illustration from Viy, a short story by Nikolai Gogol, which was also made into a seriously incredible movie. It was the first soviet era horror movie produced in Russia and slipped under the radar because of the traditional folk tale elements it contained.



Totally insane technicolor, witches, demons, flying coffins... I love it. There's actually a remake in the works that looks really good!