Sequenti Die Aurora Apparente, Altis Vocibus Baphometh Invocaverunt

It's been too long, and I've admittedly not been working as hard or as quickly as a should be. But I'm about to really buckle down to try to finish a big (literally large) project so that I can have a good chunk of October to myself for Halloween things (turnip and pumpkin carving, costume and mask making, visiting creepy attractions).

So the thing I'm working on right now is actually a movie poster for someone's AFI student thesis film. It's a short film called Narcocorrido and the director came to me interested in using Santa Muerte imagery for the poster and since that's something I'm interested in I said yes. The process of designing and drawing this has been longer than my usual personal process since it involves a lot of back and forth and I'm still working on the final drawing which is large and involved but here's a little chunk of it:
I'm hoping to have this inked and to start painting it by this weekend since there's a lot of detail and the piece is so big. I'll probably have more insight on this later but it's always strange for me to work with Catholic imagery, having been raised Catholic and probably having the most ingrained understanding of this particular kind of symbolism and yet having no actual personal connection to it (as well as a great deal of disdain for the Catholic church). I kind of want to work with it more since I don't think it's any less strange or interesting than any other belief system (and in many cases the symbolism and practice is adapted from earlier pagan tradition) and leaving it out only serves to support the idea that Western Christianity is somehow a religious standard against which everything else is deemed "exotic", strange or superstitious. I also admittedly love Medieval art which is pretty much ALL religious because it's grim and gory in a disarmingly ornate and colorful way.

I also finished the thing I was working on for my trade with david cook. Probably the things I get the most feedback from are the series of upside down crosses I did last summer (I don't flatter myself, I know it's the shape) and he was interested in them so I broke out the unused crosses I still had around and made another. While the other ones were more a play on inverted icons and malevolent spirits this one was just me inventing a summoned demon because I was reading the Grimorium Verum at the time.
I reused some things that worked well in the previous pieces (the horns and clouds) since it's such a difficult shape to work with. Like I mentioned before I like weird and colorful demons in medieval art so I stuck with that, and added the little flame of enlightenment from the Sabbatic Goat.

I finished that book Raising Hell: a Concise History of the Black Arts- and Those Who Dared To Practice Them which referenced the Grimorium Verum a lot. I remembered I had a copy I hadn't read yet and plowed through it. Necromancy and the summoning of demons is strange because the whole thing is so utterly Christian and relies on a belief in god to control "dark forces" despite how "satanic" it's generally believed to be probably because it was outlawed by the church. Most of the motivations are pretty hilariously earthly. A lot of them deal with finding money, controlling women (f.u. wizard), telling the future, traveling swiftly etc. Related to the Grimorium Verum, I bought this book Grimoires: A History of Magic Books a while ago and haven't read very far into it yet but the actual history of these books is pretty fascinating and full of intrigue, hoaxes and weirdness.

Back to trading, if you haven't seen David's work you should. It's intricate colorful, weird (mildly pornographic), and entirely hand done:
I also recently went to NY to meet up with Tamara and we did a trade and I got to walk away with this:
which I've had my eye on for a while now. Tamara is a super talented (printer, painter and tattoo artist) and extremely motivated lady and it was awesome getting to sit around drinking coffee and talking about art and hard work with her! Check out her stuff!

Anyway, if you live in Philly and you see me wandering the streets in the next few weeks yukking it up and chugging coffee smack me in the head and remind me to get back to work already. 32 Days 'til Halloween!

Who Is In Dust Awakens

I've been pretty absent from posting because I'm at a really weird point now. In the planning stages of a commission bouncing sketches back and forth with not much to show anyone else yet. I'm admittedly pretty impatient and not much of a planner, and my process is usually "got an idea, draw it out, paint it" but when you're working in a medium as impossible to change or edit as gouache and casein paint are, it's pretty integral to get everything straight before you get started on something for someone else.

Because not having anything to work on makes me anxious and finishing projects, even small ones is something I find weirdly reassuring I started the drawing for a trade I'm doing. It'll be another one of those wooden crosses, inspired by a lot of the demonology stuff I've been reading. More on that later.
I should have a final drawing for the commission I'm working on, info about what it is and a bunch of rambling about demonology and all the new books I bought about oracles and Greek mystery cults coming up. Blah blah blah.

This post is boring, maybe read this instead?

You Sealed Your Doom, Your Time Has Come

Spent a little longer than I thought I'd have to (always the case) on this t-shirt design due to "Hurricane" complications. Some shitty (very old) wiring fried when water got in our basement and we thought we were about to have an electrical fire so our power was out for a while. It's worth noting that the two things I opted to save in the event of a potential emergency were my cat and a portfolio of paintings, including this one:
I get pretty stuck for tshirt design ideas, because they're more design oriented and less narrative and a lot of the ideas I have stored away work better for full paintings. This shirt started with some gates I saw and photographed at Edgecomb Cemetery in Maine:
I added some touches to the original urn:
Draped urns are pretty common in Victorian Cemetery iconography, with the urn representing the body and the veil representing the "veil" separating the world of the living from the world of the dead. Oddly enough, Cremation was very rare in Victorian times, but the cremation urn was a popular symbol of the corporeal world anyway.

The Omega is the last letter in the Greek alphabet and is often used to represent simply "the end" or the end of time or of life. You'll also see it along with the alpha (the beginning) in christian churches fairly often. A Theta would also have been appropriate and I thought about working both of them in but thought it was overkill.

It should be pretty clear by this point that I really like doing mist and smoke and ghost hands, because I've worked them into most things I've done for the past year. It's just really fun to paint and I think it adds some dimension.
If you're interested in exploring cemeteries and making sense of the symbolism there (and there's tons of it) this book is really great:
It's organized by symbol type (animals, plants, religious, figural, secret societies) , full of images from all over the world, and conveniently small so you could feasibly bring it out to a cemetery with you. AND you can order it from the Laurel Hill gift shop and in doing so support one of my favorite Philadelphia historical landmarks.

About to buckle down and work on a movie poster design and in the early stages of planning a curated show with some friends. More on that later....

Waiting At The End Of Time

Linework for a T-shirt in progress! Already about 1/3 painted.

Salem's Lot

Back from my little trip to Maine with Mike to visit my grandfather. 5 full days away and I hiked 5 State Parks/Preserves I'd never been to and saw 5 cemeteries I hadn't seen before. New England Cemeteries are some of my favorite and they're everywhere on the side of the road, most of them extremely old with some amazing iconography and atmosphere. Anyone who's every traveled with me anywhere knows that I can spend hours pouring over every stone in a cemetery and taking hundreds of photos (so annoying). Here's just a couple:

I have also been taking hundreds of photos of weird mushrooms and fungus, and we see tons in Maine because the damp rotting leaves on the forest floors are a perfect breeding ground. A few of those:

I was very excited to find a "blue staining" mushroom (I think a Bolete?). When you break or cut these mushrooms you can actually watch them turn blue as they hit the air. I took a video. If you're interested in literally HUNDREDS of photos of mushrooms, fungus, frogs and cemeteries you can see the whole set here.

We also had a night of fireworks over Pemaquid Beach! Most years I miss them:
We also got a chance to stop at the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, which was great. I got to meet this Bigfoot:
The museum also happens to be located in the back of a really awesome used book store called Green Hand Books. They had a great selection of horror, sci fi and occult books so naturally I couldn't pass through without buying some.
I'm already halfway though Raising Hell: a Concise History of the Black Arts- and Those Who Dared To Practice Them by Robert Masello. It's really well organized and full of entertaining and creepy factoids about necromancy and divination and conjuring demons that no doubt will make their way into a painting sometime soon. It's also refreshing to read something written after the early 1900's because there's a little more interpretation and some sarcastic humor that makes it a bit more readable.

I read bits here and there from The Story of Superstition by Philip F. Waterman. It's a neat old book, with a lot of cool stuff that's pertinent to a project I've been planning about the evil eye. It's a bit disorganized and lacks focus (wandering randomly from topic to topic) but will definitely be useful to have.

The last book Spirit Summonings is from the Time Life series Mysteries of the Unknown. These books look a little corny but you can find them everywhere, they're cheap and really image heavy and actually have a lot of good information. I got it because I'm working on a shirt design right now that will probably use some victorian funerary iconography/ spiritualism stuff. The book has some nice original illustrations of seances, some awesome photographs, and a lot of information about a few cases I hadn't heard of. It also has some hilarious photos of modern mediums channeling that really just amount to a series of people in windbreakers (the book is from 1989) making hilarious faces.

I didn't draw at all while I was away so I have a LOT of work to do.

A Rown-Tree, Witch!

I finally finished that big piece last week! It took an unusually long time because of the size and the amount of detail I put into the background and because I was making a point to be a little more thoughtful about planning and color selection. I was offered an opportunity to have some of my prints produced and up for sale on a site and I wanted to make something really over the top and brand new (exclusive! whatever...)

Anyway, here it is (ignore the light leak on the right side and definitely click to see it larger):
I was doing some sketching when I started this but couldn't land on an idea I was really excited about. I keep a little list of ideas, images and stories I think could turn into an illustration someday and I revisit it every so often to see if any of those ideas are appropriate for whatever project I'm working on. I had made a note to myself about how interesting this image was:
I found it in the "Mysteries of the Unknown: Witches and Witchcraft" with the caption:
"Satan directs his minions from a hollow tree in this 1591 woodcut of the North Berwick witches." I made a note of the fact that the devil was emerging from a hollow tree because it seemed unique to me and reminded me of some of the reading I did about forest demons while doing research for the Unclean Spirits show. Forest demons and tree spirits seem very common in the folklore of cultures all over the world. In reading you'll also see the association of forests and specific trees with the devil and witches as habitation and ritual sites, presumably a connection made during the rise of Christianity when all the trappings of the previous pagan religions were relegated to the supernatural and demonic world.

A lot of the Slavic folklore I read referred to spirits like the Leshii who interferes with humans in defense of the forest. Across many many cultures there are spirits that live in the trees themselves and live or die depending on the state of the tree, or will brutally avenge any harm done to it. German folklore seems particularly full of scary forest demons like the Bockmann and the Baumese as well as the Wild Hunstman. I like the idea of these spirits of place which have a sort of shared consciousness and are intimidating because...well forests are intimidating and were even more so when people couldn't hear the highway from them.

It's dark in there!

The Forest in Folklore and Mythology by Alexander Porteous which I mentioned in a previous post is seriously full of so much relevant information that I'm having a lot of trouble summarizing it here for the purpose of this post. If you're interested in stuff like this you should probably just read it. Like a lot of folklore texts from the time it doesn't have a ton of insight and is more a collection of information, but it's a little smoother to read than a lot of the others I have and makes more connections than some of the ones that just read like lists of facts.

I think I drew the demon with european medieval images of demons in mind because I've always liked how bizarre and colorful they are. Here's a picture I took of a painting of one in the Cloisters in New York:

Dog legs? Face crotch?

I also wanted to give a nod to the aesthetic of the Sabbatic Goat and the Horned God without it looking directly like either of them and wanted it to be a composite of all the kinds of wildlife in a forest.

Anyway, if all goes as planned this piece along with a few others and another new design will be available to purchase through Shirts and Destroy in a few months. This is happy news because they are awesome and their products come out great and because I am fully aware that trying to deal with printing and selling prints on a person by person basis through email has been totally absurd and irritating for everyone involved. Up to this point I've really failed at making the things I make available for purchase online but hopefully that will change very soon!

In the course of working on this really labor intensive piece Mike and I watched countless movies and got particularly hung up on horror movie documentaries. Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape was particularly good (and long!). We also picked through youtube and found the Fangoria produced "Scream Greats" series. Here's a link to the special on Tom Savini (Pittsburgh friends, I think this is the one that includes a lot of footage of him walking around Bloomfield) and one to a special about Witchcraft and Satanism (Wiccans with astounding NY/NJ accents). I also watched some old Satanic Panic videos. This British one "In Satan's Name" is particularly comprehensive (tons of "recovered memory" weirdness, also an interview with Boyd Rice if you're into that) and if you're into pointy eyebrowed Satanist hilarity (Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon!) please do watch Satanis: The Devil's Mass.

Leaving for Maine in the middle of the night tonight for a week of lurking in the fog by the ocean, taking hikes on the mushroom covered trails near my grandfather's house and sketching and hanging out and most importantly getting the fuck out of the garbage strewn sweltering pit that is South Philadelphia in August. See ya.

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.