Huginn To The Hanged And Muninn To The Slain

Heya

I'm feeling uncharacteristically down on stuff lately so I admittedly haven't been very productive. Here's a few process pictures of stuff I have managed to get started.

The ink drawing for the topper that will go on the frame for the giant piece I have in the works:
And a shot of it as I started to paint it last week. I've gotten way further since:
This is Huginn and Muninn Odin's ravens (thought and memory) flanking his eye which will be positioned at the top of the frame looking down at the whole world that will (hopefully, by the end of the year) be rendered below it.

Basically for this project which will take place over the span of en entire year, I needed to think of a subject that would be able to do in pieces on a large scale. It's hard to explain but the way the paint I use seems to work, and the rate at which it starts to dry out and separate after being mixed means making one big uniform area of color is really hard for me. I wanted to do something with a layered world with a lot of different textures and colors, something where I could represent water, forests, sky, creatures, and subterranean creeps. It occurred to me that the Norse structure of the universe would give me lots of opportunity to do all that. I'll write more about it when it's a bit more underway.

Aside from this project I'm working on a present I can't post for a couple more weeks, and starting a small poster for a friend to be used as a bonus insert for pre-orders of a record he's putting out. Here's a sketch for it:
This is a noteworthy sketch because generally my sketches are jumbled completely unrendered garbage that I can't make heads or tales of even a few days after making it. Observe:
Good thing I labeled everything?

Bleh.

All That Tread The Globe Are But A Handful To The Tribes That Slumber In its Bosom

Hey hey,

I have a few more images from the show. You can see pictures of the opening on Part Time's site (including a photo of the awesome anchor shaped cookies my mom made!). Here's a picture our friend Roxy took of the window vinyl:
And here are a few photos my friend Ryann took of two of the pieces, the Melusine with some close ups:

And one of the whale bones I had previously only posted close ups of:


I also thought I'd talk about flea markets for a minute. Around PA (and Jerz) we have "farmers markets" that are not at all what you are picturing. While they do sell produce and supplies, they are essentially elaborate dirtmalls with extensive outdoor (and indoor) flea markets where people sell all kinds of terrific (and pointless) junk. Whole stalls of rusty metal, single watch bands, 12 packs of dollar store bras for 5 bucks (suspicious), knock off handbags, bins filled with hundreds of dirty toys, knives, swords, biker jewelry, cassettes, old magazines and comics, essentially heaven for cheap junkhounds. There are also many food stands but my friends and I have a long standing personal rule to never eat from the dirt mall that is only broken at the Berlin Mart apple cider donut stand. My two favorite are the Berlin Mart (NJ) and the Quakertown Mart (PA) (aka Qmart) where I found this:
Framing for shows can be really expensive, even when you do it yourself with cheap(er) ikea frames, and while I think uniform plain frames can be good and less distracting I'm usually after weird shapes and elaborate decorative frames so all of mine come from one of three places: the aforementioned farmers markets where I've picked up dozens of frames usually for 1-6 bucks, from my aunt who finds them at thrift stores in Nebraska and mails them to me, and my grandfather's basement. Last weekend we went to the Berlin mart for the first time since the fall and I did really well:
I got those four frames plus another round one I didn't photograph (plus all of that other awesome junk). I'm generally after gold, round or oval, decorative frames. I think all four of those came to 3 dollars. At this point I have a pretty good stockpile of weird medium to small size frames and just grab one and make a piece to fit when I think of something appropriate. I recommend this tactic as you 1) save money 2) don't buy something new when something used works just as well 3) give your money to a flea market weirdo instead of a big company and 4) will have a bunch of really cool looking frames.

Unrelated to art my second most sought after items are "shitty gorillas" for my collection of poorly produced and poorly painted plastic gorillas:
Anyway, hopefully soon I'll have a scan of the last piece I did for the show, some babble about Kull and Atlantis, and some process photos of what I'm working on now, which is my piece for the "1 Year Project" (heads up, my piece is Norse themed and huge).

Originals for sale online!

Hey, guess what! The gallery hosting my most recent show will have an online store up for a limited time where you can buy a framed original piece of mine or Mike's. And they ship! Feel free to contact me for better images of pieces I haven't posted yet if you can't make them out from the webstore photos.
Visit the store here:
http://www.parttimestudios.bigcartel.com/

Infinitus Sleep Has Ended

I'm waiting for some photos of some of the bigger (less easily scann-able) pieces from the show to post in full here as well as some photos taken of everything hanging and the opening itself, so in the meantime here's the full scan of the Bake-Kujira I just posted a close up of previously:

and a close up of the weird pink water:
and a close of up of one of the weird birds:
I'll write a longer entry about the show when I get some images to share, and when i have some more rambling junk about what I'm working on next.

So We Go Inside And We Gravely Read The Stones

I'll save my long update for later this week when I have everything photographed and scanned but I finished my last piece for the show. Here's a teeny tiny detail I thought I should post since it's doubtful anyone will notice it otherwise. A cemetery the size of a nickle in the sunken city painting:
The frames are mostly painted, most of the backings are cut, just assembling the display boxes that Josh made for me (expertly as usual), getting all the hanging devices in order etc. If everything is ready to go by wed I might make two miniature last minute pieces. I'd really like to get to those but I'm trying to be reasonable. Until then, more coffee!

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.

If I Rock Upon The Waves, Then No Corpse Can Lie Upon Me

I took me two weeks but I finally finished that big piece. Last week was kind of a wash, so I did most of the work on the weekend and once again messed my hand up painting scales for like 10 hours. Here are a couple photos of it. I'm still figuring out how to get something this big scanned:
This is the Melusine, a (often) twin tailed serpent woman from Medieval European literature and folklore. She married a mortal while in human form with the stipulation that he never see her bathing every Saturday. Naturally, he peeked and saw her in her serpent form at which point she flew away (in some stories she can still be found roaming as serpent or beautiful woman with a golden key in her mouth). The idea of mortals marrying gods and supernatural creatures is present in a lot of myths and stories, and usually comes with some caveat like this, and pretty much always ends poorly. The twin tailed mermaid image is also used as an alchemical symbol, and in heraldic imagery:
Here she is fleeing the castle:
When I was planning this out I wanted to make some nod to the medieval habit of using arbitrary scale in artwork, presenting a building as tall as a person, focusing more on narrative than realistic presentation. I also combined my idea for the Melusine sketch with a sketch I did based on a Robert E. Howard poem, the Singer in the Mist.

"At birth a witch laid on me monstrous spells,
And I have trod strange highroads all my days,
Turning my feet to gray, unholy ways.
I grope for stems of broken asphodels;
HIgh on the rims of bare, fiend-haunted fells,
I follow cloven tracks that lie ablaze;
And ghosts have led me through the moonlight's haze
To talk with demons in the granite hells.

Seas crash upon dragon-guarded shores,
Bursting in crimson moons of burning spray,
And iron castles ope to me their doors,
And serpent-women lure with harp and lay.
The misty waves shake now to phantom oars—
Seek not for me; I sail to meet the day. "

If I haven't recommended his poetry before, I am now. 50% of it is about werewolves.

So, I've noticed that Pelikan Plaka is becoming less and less available and decided to start trying out a few new kinds of paint. My two biggest requirements are that it have a matte finish, and be opaque with a high level of pigment. Also water soluble.

I got a couple jars of this Turner Neo Color and so far I'm really into it. I will admit I was drawn in by the labels which don't seem to have changed since it was first intruduced in the 60's and by the fact that it comes in fairly large jars (and can also be purchased in what are basically small buckets). It's made for sign painting and design much like Plaka, but is a bit more fluid, cheaper, and doesn't have the same alarming chemical smell. It also doesn't build as quickly on the paper so the finished product is relatively free of all that pesky texture which bothers me so much.
I also tried out some of this Acryl Gouache. It's pretty cool but a bit more expensive and less fluid than the neo color, but with really bright opaque colors. Not bad! I'll still be bummed if Plaka disappears altogether though, because somehow their black is the BLACKEST and that's essential.

Anyway, I'm hoping to crank out two more pieces before doing all the framing and whatever else I think I can squeeze in before the show. Listening to Fever Ray and getting weird. Bleh!

Last Minute Group Show!

This flier is really heinous. Anyway my friend Alicia who's an extremely nauseatingly talented artist works at a fancy flower shop and curated a little show for what they're hoping will become a second Thursday regular event. It's in liberty walk, a creepy pre-fab art community in No. Libs. Most of the people in this show are my cool talented friends so if you're around check it out! Also PIZZA. She asked for pieces with animals or flowers in them so I gave her that Laurel Hill piece.

Bury Me At Sea, Where No Murdered Ghost Can Haunt Me

Well as of right now I have 5 pieces finished for my show, with one in progress and two more on deck (pardon the unintentional nautical pun). I finished the Bake-kujira which I posted an in progress photo of last week. Im back to just posting in progress and sneak peak photos until closer to my show when I'll hopefully have good scans and nice photos of the full pieces. Here's a shot of the finished Bake-kujira:
The color is pretty off there, the background is actually green. Strange.

I'm really excited about the piece I just started. It's the Melusine, a two tailed mermaid/serpent woman from medieval French literature, who married a human and attempted to hide her monstrous secret from him. I'll write more about that later. Here's a close up of the pencil stage:
And here's a shot of it with the background finished:
What's really exciting is how I've managed to scale up for this show. I guess I'm getting faster because These pieces have the same amount of detail but are all as large or larger than the biggest pieces from my last show. This one of Melusine is the biggest so far and I'm putting it in a mirror frame I got at a dirt mall:
Here it is with a regulation size cat, Mr. Vinegar Vincent Price, in it ^ I like the way it looks gold but I'll be painting it black for the show since all of my pieces will be in black frames and all of Mike's will be in gold. Because this one is a little bigger I'm assuming it'll take about a week and a half to finish since there's a lot of water detail, the detail in the castle bricks and all the scales on her tail. Woof. After that I'm aiming for another medium sized piece and that final whale bone.

I'd really like to do a few little fun things for this show, like design a button set to give out, and make some screen printed labels to put on the back of all the pieces as well as looking into getting some limited runs of prints made to have available at the show. But first priority is making the paintings. I was also going to try to make some anchor shaped cookies for the show. What's my problem?

Next week I'll hopefully have a lot more of this painting done and will also probably make a long winded post about supplies since the Pelikan Plaka well seems to have run dry and I just bought a whole bunch of other kinds of gauche and casein paints to experiment with. Oh and I'll be busy turning 30 tomorrow .

I Come Old Friend From Hell Tonight, Across The Rotting Sea

Soooooo it's slow going at the moment. It took a while to get my drawing down last week and I had a lot of stuff to do over the weekend so I didn't buckle down like I usually do (read: I went outside!). Here are a few in progress photos of the Bake-kujira:
The Bake-kujira is a ghost whale attended by strange fish and birds in Japanese folklore. I'm so-so on how it's coming out, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to draw something that had a visible skeleton. The link I provided above is to the Obakemono Project which is really cool and worth checking out. It's a series of little stylized illustrations and entries on yokai.

Hey, check it out, here's a show card:

Please come!

There are so many things I want to do for this show but as always I have limited time. I'm still thinking about doing Melusine, something about a sunken city either from Poe's "The City in the Sea" or an R.E.H. poem (he has a lot to say about Atlantis), something about sailors valentines, and maybe something about drowned sailors getting revenge (like from all those E.C. comics and the Fog, and this song which is so unbelievably stuck in my head right now). I'm also still mulling over how to do something related to the Flying Dutchman or Davy Jones even though those two bits of folklore got Disneyed to death with the Pirates of the Caribbean. Also still working my way through that William Hope Hodgson book.

I'm getting the winter crazies and hoping that this show being done will correspond with the beginning of spring. As much as I like snow and even sometimes the cold I'm getting pretty stir crazy and would like to be able to ride my bike without eating shit on the ice and so on.

Such Is The Way Of Demons, The Wont Of Devils

Soooooo I hated making this painting. Remember how I said there seemed to be something up with the paper I used for the last one? Well there's definitely something up. It's obviously my fault for using it again, but this time it was way worse, with any mixed paint I used separating and smearing on the paper (but working fine on other papers I tested it on). I had a mini meltdown Friday night and almost scrapped it but worked through the problems, making some color concessions to use premixed paints I had. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
Wtf? It was basically like having someone slap your pencil as you write. Every time I put the brush down on the paper it got worse. The red in the purple I mixed was sinking into the paper while the blue was smearing around on top which meant anytime I brushed back over a spot the blue lifted off and magenta/purple smeared out from underneath.


Annnnyyyyway. This guy is a Devil Whale, or Aspidochelone, orrr Jasconius. It's a pretty pervasive idea in various folklore, but I first remember reading about it in the Voyages of Sinbad as a kid. It's a "whale", giant fish or giant sea turtle that, according to medieval bestiaries, lures sailors onto its back as it has the basic appearance of a small uninhabited island. When the sailors light a fire to cook food the monster awakens and pulls them and their ship to the bottom of the ocean. Here are a few old illustrations of some:The little seaweed fins on my guy where inspired by this totally weird Tassled Wobbegong a kind of "carpet shark":


I didn't make it a literal whale because so many things described as whales in maritime lore are not literal whales, and sometimes things called "devil whales" where further described as being giant sea turtles.

Doing all those tiny scales meant gripping a brush super hard for a full day so my hand is pretty brutalized at the moment. I took Monday to just lay around reading and sketching. I've been working my way through this book:
A collection of short ocean themed horror stories by William Hope Hodgson. Previously I had only read the Voice in the Dawn an extremely creepy fungus themed story which was adapted by Toho in the weirdest most psychedelic way ever into this movie, Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People which is also very entertaining on it's own merits:


All the stories I've read so far from this collection have been great, and Hodgson is particularly good at making the ships and the ocean itself sound like endlessly dark mysterious places, with horrible unseen things lurking in shadowy corners and snatching people away one by one. I recommend it!

Anyway, I'm slacking this week and really need to pick up the pace. Ow. My hand.

Red Sky At Night, Sailor's delight, Red Sky In Morning, Sailor's Warning

Still working at what I've determined is my maximum pace, I finished another week-long piece yesterday. The bulk of the progress was made Friday when Mike and I watched SEVEN movies, (five of which were John Carpenter) while our good for nothing cats^ slept blissfully on the radiator, not a care in their little pea brains.

The most intense but strangely hypnotic to work on part of this one was the water. I actually spent a long time wrestling with the sky, and had to make some (luckily positive) edits after finding I was having the same streaky paint problem I've had in the past. I'm pretty sure the problem is actually the particular paper I occasionally use, but both times I've had to rework the sky because of it it's come out better than I planned. Some close ups:
The image is based on an account I read in this really cool book:
Which is a collection of available information on the occult at the turn of the century (no new age junk). There's a Scottish story about the Macdonalds of Glencoe, who were transporting the chief of their clan to an island for burial when his body was lost in a storm at sea. From that point forward the phantom funeral skiff would appear to members of the clan as a portent of doom anytime something tragic was about to happen to them. It was said to be accompanied by ghostly female mourners loudly singing a dirge.

The candles are "fetch-lights" or "ghost candles" which supposedly appeared above an unburied body or at the place where a body was lost at sea, or as warnings of death. There's a bit of information on them in the Encyclopedia of occultism and even more in this book from the 70's, which has an incredibly cool cover:
The term fetch is generally applied to a vision of a doomed person's doppelganger before their death, which typically appears to a loved one or to the person themselves (terrifying!). Additionally the Irish and Scottish banshee (bean sidhe and bean shith respectively) is very much related to the tone of the phantom funeral skiff, as banshees are typically attached to a particular clan and appear before deaths of members until the clan has died out. Apparently if the banshee is the spirit of someone close to the family who loved them they appear calmly to escort the damned person like an angel, but if they are the spirit of someone who hated the family they appear to scream gleefully because another member of the family is dead.

Now is a good time to mention the fact that I grew up afraid of banshees and still think about what I would do if one showed up screaming at my window. Related to the fetch, my aunt on the Italian side of my family once told me about the superstition that family members see a vision of a person about to die and told me she saw her great uncle with whom she shared a birthday in a dream the night he died. Needless to say this was horrifying to me.

Incidentally the title of this post comes from a bit of fisherman's weather lore my grandfather told me about when I was a kid.

Anyway. Back to my perpetual panic. Up next will probably be a Devil Whale. I also still have one more bone to paint on but it's been impossible to sand down.