Creeping Things That Run In Hedge Bottoms

Still slow updating because the painting I'm working on now is probably the most complicated one I've done yet. I will admit I have also been tempted out of the house by canoe trips in the Pine Barrens and very important pool opportunities but mostly I've had my head down painting and watching tons of horror movie documentaries and endless episodes of Home Movies. There are lots of tiny details (creatures, trees, fur, scales etc), but it should be finished by the end of this weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to find a place to get something this size scanned, then I'll talk about what it is and what it's for. Here are a few bits and pieces I photographed pretttttty poorly last night:



Also, the "From Whence We Came" Group show is coming down next week with a closing event August 6th from 4-6. There's still lots of cool art left (mine sold though) and Ryann is really close to her donation goal so if you live in the area and haven't stopped by yet go for it. I have a picture of my piece framed for once:
That's a 50 cent flea market frame! Cutting the plexi for it was a brutal nightmare!

Back to painting and willing Fall to come sooner.

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.

Vampire Squid From Hell

I've been really long between updates lately. Taking care of a personal stuff but also waiting for good photos and scans is always an issue. Here's a full photo (getting a scan made didn't work out) of my piece for the "From Whence We Came" group show to benefit Oceana and Sea Sheperd:
This guy is a Vampire Squid, latin name Vampyroteuthis Infernalis ("vampire squid from hell"). It's not actually a true squid but rather an living fossil, the last of its own order which shares traits of both squid and octopuses.
The two filaments that you see hanging from the underside of the squid are one of the things unique to this particular order and are used for sensing prey. Unlike most animals that have the "vampire" moniker these squid don't drink blood but are rather named because of the black underside webbing between their tentacles that they flip up over their bodies like a cloak to hide in the dark water from both prey and predators.

bleh.

Like many deep sea animals they are covered with photophores and capable of producing light displays and expressing bio-luminescent particles to confuse predators and using their glow to mask their silhouette from prey looking up from the deep sea towards the muted surface light. My original plan for this show was to do some embroideries of deep sea animals glowing using this glow in the dark embroidery floss I got, but I didn't trust my speed with embroidery so I opted to do a painting instead and tracked down some strong glow in the dark paint that glowed the actual blue color that the squid does:

Because they're so seldom seen I got my reference for how they look in action from a couple really amazing videos I highly suggest you watch, because watching how all of these features work in practice is pretty great, especially the light organs on the top of the head which can be constricted to imitate eyes moving away in the dark.


One of the things I really like about this and other deep sea creatures is the fact that the features that make it look scary or threatening are mostly there for defensive purposes in an inhospitable and dark environment. I could have done another piece about ocean folklore but sometimes natural things are way weirder and scarier and more interesting than anything humans create or embellish.

Going to help hang the show tonight! Check it out Friday if you're in the area.

From Whence We Came

So in 2009 my friend Josh organized a bird themed show called "For Those to Come" to benefit the Bird Conservancy, and I contributed a few pieces. This year my friend Ryann decided to do the same thing but with the ocean as the theme and beneficiary. I recently finished my piece for the show, a portrait of a vampire squid, but I have to go get it scanned so for the time being I thought I'd put up a few in progress (pre-outlining) photos and the copy and info for the show, in case anyone is interested in attending. I'll post a finished scan and give some more info on this monster next week.

"The various issues plaguing our world’s oceans are neither simple nor easy to address. Contamination of water sources, destruction of habitat and the consistent (often brutal) depletion of the world’s marine organisms has led to what many experts have suggested is a global epidemic; a crisis that scientists believe could be irreversible in the next twenty years. In fact, the delicate balance that controls the ocean is being tipped by our own hands and it is only by our intervention that we can begin to save the quality and quantity of life living in the open seas. Protecting the world’s marine ecosystems isn’t a political or geographic problem, at best, it should be a global call to action but it can start right here in Philadelphia.

This July, over 40 artists have donated their time and work to ocean conservation. "From Whence We Came" features art from multiple mediums and from artists throughout the US, each piece expressing the artists own interpretation of the ocean and water-related themes. All proceeds from the show will be donated to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society & Oceana, two charities committed to protecting and preserving the world’s oceans. Come see the show, buy some art and know that your involvement will make a difference."

The artist list includes:
Zach Baez, Bonsky, Alan Brown, Michael Bukowski, Ryann Casey, Tracey Cocco, Alex Curtis, Adriane Dalton, Jeanne D'Angelo, Matt DiFilippo, Stephanie Dimiskovski, Melissa Farley, Craig Fineburg, Keegan Fink, Justin Gray, Sarah Grocholski-Breitenstein, Eleanor Grosch, Joseph Hasenauer, Katie Henry, Zia Hiltey, Kane Humboldt, Andrew Johnson-Lally, Doug LaRocca, Emily Kohl-Mattingley, John Mitchell, Lauren McEwen, Kathryn Moran, Gabrielle Muller, Alicia Neal, Joslyn Newman, Duong Nguyen, Melissa Papadakis, Lucy Price, Mary Price, Josh Robeson, Jonathan Schoonover, Maria Smith, Kristen Spor-Cooper, Eric Thivierge, Ketch Wehr, Peter Wonsowski

Benna’s café

1236 S. 8th St.

Friday, July 8 · 7:00pm - 9:00pm

show runs until August 10th

Real Child Of Hell

I finished this last week but kept forgetting to post it. It's the header for that huge daunting Norse universe project I'll be working on slowly for the rest of the year. It's maybe 9in wide and fits into the top of the frame (an old mirror) I got for the piece:
I also realized I hadn't posted process pictures in a while and since people sometimes ask, here's the line drawing for the painting I'm working on this month:
I draw in pencil then ink with microns and erase the pencil since the lead can mix with paint and muddy it. I basically use my own pen drawings like blank coloring book pages I paint over though I occasionally add some hatch lines and note where wrinkles and stuff will be just to give myself something to build on. I actually already painted in the background for this one, so I'll get a shot of it in that stage and then when it's painted but before I add the black outline.

This piece is for a benefit show I'll be a part of next month, I'll post more info about the show and about the piece itself later.

The Sun Is Out Spinning On Its Axis, Lead White Vapor In The Clouds

This is the last painting I finished for the Across the Haunted Sea show I had in March. I didn't have a good photograph of it and haven't gone to get it scanned yet since it's pretty big (about 19 inches tall.

I've mentioned before that there have been times that the color has really gotten away from me and I think that happened here but I'm still happy with the way the detail came out in this one.

I posted about the tiny cemetery above previously, if you want to see a picture that shows scale.

I tried something I don't usually here and outlined the background city in a dark green grey so that the skeleton would be more pronounced as the foreground, since it was supposed to be overlooking the city in the distance. I think that worked ok, but I'm not sure it translates well in this photograph. It might be something I experiment with more in the future to add some more depth, as much as I like black outline.

I had a couple of ideas about sunken cities I wanted to work into this show, and this one is primarily influenced by Poe's "The City in the Sea/ The Doomed City" though I also grabbed things from previous sketches of Kitezh a legendary Russian sunken city, and a Robert E. Howard poem about a sunken city that would rise again that I had sketched out in the early stages of getting ready for that show.

As a kid with an active imagination I did a lot of daydreaming and loved staring into murky ocean water in Maine and imagining what could be down there and what it would be like to live there (ok, as a child I was really not grounded in reality), so I've always been attracted to stories about sunken cities, and ships and lost civilizations and continents. I particularly like the world view that Howard borrows from Madame Blavatsky, that there are different eras of humanity that rise up, and are swallowed by the ocean only to be replaced by the next era. I like any story that digs at the sense of specialness and permanance that most humans rely on to counteract the terrifying unpredictability and finiteness of life and the reality that the earth could wipe us out in a second and I like the idea that each era lives without realizing that they are living in a doomed society.

I have more work to post later this week to make up for my lazy silence and I'm starting a new project today.

R.F.T.W.

I haven't been very good at posting this month, as I have a bunch of projects in an uninteresting half finished state, spent a weekend in new york and am now mysteriously summer sick. But I have been working and I have an older recently (somewhat poorly) photographed painting to post, as well as the finished header for that norse year-long project and am getting started on a new piece. For the time being though, here's a quick mini (2 1/2 in) rat fink I made for a friend last night:

Spit Up Blood, When You Cough

I've been sitting on this one for a few days because I've just been too busy to write about it. I also probably should have waited to post it with color so you could make out the text but whatever. This is a shirt for my buddy Carol's store. I made one for her last year and she thought it would be cool to have another design for this summer (her store is at the shore, so she gets summer business). I'm always happy to do things for friends who tell me to draw whatever I want and pay me in records!

I decided to do a drawing of a medium expressing ectoplasm through her nose and mouth. Here are some close ups:

The whole design is supposed to be roughly heart-shaped which you can see a little better in this photo:
The practice of producing "ectoplasm" was fairly common for physical mediums and is supposed to be a physical manifestation of a spirit presence. It's often described as "gauze-like" because....it was gauze, produced from the nose, mouth, ears and well...crotches of mediums garnishing their showmanship with something physical, and was often the subject of spiritualist trick photography. Here are some of those photographs:

This is the medium Mrs. Mary Marshall producing an ectoplasmic apparition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who was an avid spiritualist and active participant in the movement.

"These emanations are reportedly warm to the touch and often are reported as thick, clotted, mucus-like substances. They can be rubbery and dough-like and emerge from a body orifice, such as the mouth, ears or nose but can also come from the eyes, navel, nipples and even the vagina. The structure of the ectoplasm varied from clouds and veils, to thin rods, membranes and heavy masses. Ectoplasm was also reported to disappear when exposed to light and would snap back violently. Touching the ectoplasm, or exposing it to light, was said to be able to cause injury to the medium. This was one of the reasons that mediums insisted that séances should take place in near darkness and that sitters should not approach the mediums or the emanations that had formed. "
-from "The Haunted Museum"

The practice of producing ectoplasm was investigated and declared a fraud by Harry Houdini who made it his mission to uncover spiritualist hoaxes using his personal knowledge of the art of illusion. Most famously he made an arrangement with his wife to contact her through a medium and deliver a secret code phrase ("Rosabelle believe") post mortem, an arrangement which she upheld for ten years after his death. Naturally his spirit never appeared, proving his point. He had also contacted H.P. Lovecraft about writing a piece debunking superstition together but it was never completed. However, if you're interested in the extremely weird results of their collaboration in fiction check out Under the Pyramids, a short story based on a "real life experience" Houdini claims to have had. You can listen to the H.P. Podcraft podcast on the story here.

If you're interesting in ghost photography, this is a really good website to poke around in (I actually saw a corresponding exhibit of this photography in NY about 5 years ago), and if you're interested in the bizarre, fraudulent and occasionally thoughtful and earnest attempts made by science and the spiritualists to quantify, explain, and make contact with spirits in the afterlife I would recommend Mary Roach's book Spook (I probably have already).

If you're in Philadelphia, or will be soon check out Mike's show at Grindcore House (opening tonight). It's all work from his ongoing obsessive project where he draws basically every creature ever mentioned by Lovecraft.
You can also follow this project on his blog, http://www.yog-blogsoth.blogspot.com/.

Hey this is my 100th post!

Second Verse, Same As The First

Well, if you didn't catch it, blogger went apeshit last week and lost a whole bunch of stuff. This was perfectly timed with the long winded, link laden post I had just made about my recent trip. I'll do my best to recall what I wrote, but I don't have it in me to go all out and recreate the original so I'm just going to blow through these pictures:

Tomb entrance at Newgrange, Valley of the River Boyne, Ireland. Newgrange is part of the Brú na Bóinne complex of megalithic tombs. These would be the oldest man made structures I have ever seen (they predate the pyramids-not that I've seen those), they are astrologically aligned and contain much of the existing megalithic stone art in the world. This is the only tomb in the complex that you can enter all the way back to the burial chamber.

Knowth, Valley of the River Boyne, Ireland. Unlike Newgrange which is one large tomb, this is a whole complex of smaller tomb mounds with one larger mound. They actually have it set up so you can climb onto the top of the largest mound like people would have when it was in use. There's also tons of stone carving art here.

At the Rock of Cashel in Cashel, Co. Tipperary, Ireland. This place was amazing and crow infested and had pretty much everything I like all at once. That's me really tiny.

The ruins of the Hore Abbey, also in Cashel, Co. Tipperary. We had this pretty much to ourselves at dusk to scramble around and climb on and poke around the cemetery.

Virgin Mary statue in an Irish Cemetery.

"Aideen's Grave" a dolmen in the middle of a forest filled with huge tree height rhodedendrons, weirdly situated next to a golf course in Howth, Ireland.

Here's a crappy secret photo of the vault at St. Michan's in Dublin, Ireland, where bodies interred there in stacked coffins were naturally mummified because of the conditions in the crypt. It was here that a guide offered us an opportunity to TOUCH THE MUMMY of a crusader (for luck?!). Mike and I pretty much climbed over each other to get to it. They also have the execution order and bodies of participants of the 1798 Rebellion there.

Impressive Gothic vaulted ceiling of the abbey in Bath, England. It had a really weird unique carved facade I couldn't get a good picture of also, but check it out here.

The head of the Sulis Minerva statue from the Roman Bath ruins in Bath, England. One of my favorite things at this site was the folded metal plates with curses scratched into them that were found in the baths. People would write curses against people who wronged them and throw them into the bath in order to seek vengeance from the goddess.

The crypt at St. Leonard's Church in Hythe, Kent, England. This place was pretty amazing and neatly maintained. One of the skulls had a birds nest in it! We actually got here on the day of a wedding and had to wait for someone to let us into the crypt before the last bus out of the town left, and ended up lurking hard while the couple were taking their wedding photos.

Another picture from the crypt because it was so cool.

Anyway, I've been back for a bit now and finished up a tshirt design I'll post in full later this week. Here's a quick little sneak preview of it: