Last Post Till July

Last post until early July because we're going to California! Yay, vacation time is here for 11 days. From San Fran up to Mendocino to Humboldt Redwood Forest to Tahoe and Yosemite, Gold Country, Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Park to Napa and Sonoma and Big Sur and Santa Cruz. Whew.

I don't really like the way this little painting (5" x 5") turned out...I think the illustration board I used was about 7 years old, so maybe not so good. I'll probably fill in the background so it's solid ochre. Got the idea from the great Erte and added my own touch.

Demented and Schizo Parents

I'm watching the HBO series Rome again, and I forgot how much I absolute LOVE it. The sets are gorgeous...I'm painting all the major rooms of my house al buon fresco. And it makes me want to get back into historical fiction writing. Atia is probably my favorite...she's a grossly unorthodox mother and a diabolical bitch in general.

SO. I'm using that last bit to segue into my art topic for today: Demented and Schizo Parents. Goya's painting of Saturn Devouring His Son is a pretty well known illustrative example of this subject, and everyone knows the basic story from Hesiod...Cronus (Saturn in the Roman pantheon) was the head Titan who ate his children (a little over half of the Olympian crew) because he thought it would prevent them from taking over his turf (rational, absolutely mental, but rational). But baby Zeus was destined to dethrone his presumptuous dad, and somehow he forced Cronus to regurgitate his siblings. Hmm.

All of the paintings depicting this episode of the Theogony never portray Saturn popping the corpora whole...they alway show maniacal eyes and mouths wrenched into screwy shapes of taboo famine, ragged chunks and limbs missing from fragmentary deities in pain.

*sigh* Artists are so romantic.

And an audience loves the macabre and the grotesque...it gives us something to gauge beauty by.

But this...the Rubens Saturn. Dis. Tur. Bing. Cruelty and beauty combined. That Saturn is old and looks like he has a cane and the victim is a toddler makes it even worse. Like Choderlos de Laclos's Les liaisons dangereuses, or Cruel Intentions.

To cite Umberto Eco in his History of Beauty, "the beauty of bodies no longer has any spiritual connotation [with unfettered reason]; all it expresses is the cruel pleasure of the torturer or the torments of the victim, stripped of any moral frills."

"Drifting"

Something I did that worked out for this week's topic at Illustration Friday!

The Tree of Sorrow

Arbor tristus was believed to be a native South American tree, which bloomed at night and had a trunk in the shape of a woman's body. Legend has it that the daughter of the mighty chief and warrior Parizataco fell in love with the sun. The sun rejected her and the beautiful princess went into the wilderness to seek solitude and peace to grieve. She never got over her loss, however, and could bare the pain of rejection and lovelessness no longer and killed herself.

Her body was eventually found by her people and cremated. From the ashes sprouted the tree of sorrow, whose blossoms opened under the light of the moon and stars but closed at the first hint of the sun. In the daytime, the leaves withered, and the tree appeared dead. And whenever a human hand touched the blooming tree in the calm of the night, the flowers closed shut and their sweet perfume vanished.

Barnacle Tree

Sad past few days with a funeral and tons of doctor appointments for family members and torrential downpours on top of that. BUT, everything is green and rich and happily fertile and teeming with life. And the geese are back...

Wild geese migrating south for the summer used to be a profound mystery, and according to old mariners' stories, there were goose trees growing north of Scotland on the shores of the Orkney Islands. The trees supposedly bloomed and reached maturity with barnacles as fruit, which fell into the sea when they were ripe. Behold, geese would emerge.

Apparently, the similarity between a certain species of barnacle and an embryonic goose was uncanny. Botanists and zoologists of the 16th c reported in earnest about the existence of goose trees and barnacle geese, and some scientists even included the specimens in their herbals (above engraving THE BREEDE OF BARNAKLES, from Gerard's Herball, London 1597).

Today, the riddle has been solved but the scientific terms have stuck.

Finished Products

Yay! Put the final touches on new cards I'll be adding in my brand new Etsy store soon!

new art

I have so new art, spawned from an old ink drawing I did, first of a couple, I think. I did the ink when Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette came out. I really liked the whole stylization of the film a lot...and I loved the fact that people were pissed about the pink (and decidedly anachronistic) Chuck Taylors. Psh. I'm going to put it up in my Etsy store eventually, as a print and a postcard-style note card, accompanied by a nifty envelope I just picked up from Paper Source. God, I love Paper Source.

I just finished a sketch of another Rococo girl with a wig like ocean waves, complete with schooners and galleys and other various sea craft. Also sea monster and fish! I'll probably have it done by late tomorrow. A leaves for Ethiopia at 3 o'clock tomorrow. Ahhh, Addis...I can't wait to go to Ethiopia one of these days, see where the Nile splits and the crazy cataracts begin.

Mytho-Cosmology

This is the Norse world tree, Yggdrasill, an evergreen ash that governs the shape of the whole universe. The tree itself sprouts out of that little mountain (Asgard, where the gods get together, at the bottom of Valhalla), and the trunk is rooted by three stems in subterranean Hel. The curvilinear pathway beginning at the top of the mountain and ending at the tiny triumphal arch is Bifrost, the rainbow bridge that only heroes are permitted to use to reach Valhalla.

The first stem sprouts branches that radiate over the entire sky; the leaves are the clouds, and the fruits are the stars. The four cardinal winds are said to be stags, nibbling at stellar flower buds and dripping dew from their antlers to the earth. On the topmost branch perches the eagle (symbol of the air), and atop him perches the falcon, sentinel of the gods. The squirrel Batatosk scampers up and down the tree (symbol of precipitation) in an attempt to instigate a little tiff between the eagle and Nidhogger, the serpenty mess at the roots (symbol of vulcanic powers), always threatening the foundation.

The second stem emanates from the south in Muspellsheim where the three Norns live, and the third shoots up from Nifleheim in the north, dwelling place of the Mimir the frost-giant's fountain, from which all the knowledge of mankind flows.

This is a print from Jinn Manusen's Eddalaeren, 1824. I'm citing this nifty little book Folklore and Symolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees, put out by Dover Publications.

From the Primordial Ooze

So I came across a few images in my Hieronymus Bosch book by Laurinda Dixon, and I found they tie nicely in with my recent obsession with evolutionary biology.

Back in Bosch's golden years, the later 15 century, people believed in spontaneous generation, specifically life from water, mud, and dung. Aristotle hypothesized that the heat generated during the rotting of some substance created new organisms from the dissolution of particles during putrefaction-- organisms which later came to be regarded as deformed because of their asexual means of reproduction.

Hence, mer-creatures! These woodblocks are from the Hortus Sanitatis/Gart der Gesuntheit/Garden of Health, a pharmaceutical bestiary printed and translated a number of times during the 15 c.

Amongst others are the MONK FISH, described as having "a head like a monk...but the face is nosed like another fish and also his body." A very bookish creature. The aqueous unicorn is below him. And then there is the merknight. In Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, a merknight flirts with a siren-like creature who bends her tail backward and over her head, simulating the familiar alchemical symbol of the ouroboros. The serpent devouring its tail illustrates the cyclical essence of distillation--autocannibalism and auto-regeneration. Craziness.

The Immense Journey talks about how Darwin's On the Origin of Species stimulated more materialisic philosophies (rather than mythological, or cosmo-magical) about the wellspring of earth. Urschleim, a protoplasmic semi-animate substance on the floor of the abyssal plain, was thought to be the development of the living out of the nonliving, from which arose complex life.

Bathybius haeckelli is another interesting story.

Reading, Writing, Lunatics

Too much perversion makes me sick. Not really, just more apt to read something, ha.

So I had Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies on while I was writing, and it reminded me of my June 1 post about Beelzebub and Binsfield's classification. I read the book again a while back and recalled when I first read it and how much Simon's death really affected me. I read it over and over and over again, sickened by adolescent brutality (not even adolescent--many a time I've witnessed a little four-year-old bulldozer, flattening a smaller one to the ground, even when the weaker one is crying and on his knees and not fighting anymore), so filled with frustration and misanthropy for how pathetic and absurd it was. And then the ocean just washes him away, into its injudicious depths (very tragically beautiful, really). It really hurt my feelings...being the weak kid with the asthma problem. Did he have respiratory problems?

And then, of course, the pig and her piglets, and the pig's head on a spike...the gluttonous demon Beelzebub incarnate, foreshadowing the death of Piggy, his little porcine body rupturing like some infected pustule on the rocks. That was such a wonderfully disturbing book.

Presently, I'm in the midst of Lolita and can't get Jeremy Irons out of my mind. Way scarier than James Mason. Ehh. Creepy Creepy. Humbert Humbert, the silver-tongued rake (or so he says). Amateur poet, professional pedophiliac. BANGING writing. I'm so envious of Nabokov.

Eye Candy

So I finished a bunch of new card designs, several of which I have to add a few effects to...I figured the mushrooms would be plaid with kind of a scratchy, canvas background. The deer and the trees will be several kinds of Japanese patterns, color scheme being purple, greens, and mustard yellow--a little earthy.

Beach weekend was fun...I wasted $5 at the slots and spent $11.95 on cigarettes at Caesar's. W.T.F. Regardless, I was expecting some serious inflation. Juno shat in the house about four times. I think it messes up her sphere of territory when we take her to four different houses consistently, three of which are humongous...and the one that she has no problem with isn't a house. Our apartment is 650 square feet, which doesn't leave a lot of room for disorientation. She knows where to go and where not to go.

I was pretty much perpetually barefoot for the weekend. Score. And wine did floweth abundantly. From about 4 o'clock onwards. For 20 people being in the house, it was pretty peaceful...

Musical Death Chairs

Hard times in Pre-K today. Playing Musical Chairs was like playing Russian Roulette...depending on whoever was left standing when the music stopped. Some were normal, bummed but acquiescent and ready for another go the next time around; others did not go so quietly in the night, so to speak. Several hysterical fits ended up with me taking the little time bombs to the office because they just couldn't get over their loss. I don't know why we didn't just do what we usually do and put out as many chairs as players...everyone gets a spot, and they still have fun.

We might move to Georgia or Armenia. That could be good times.

I resurrected some old drawings and reworked them. The results will be up when my Photoshop Elements gets here (yay, I ordered it). Lots of wigs and birds' wings and tea stains.

I can't wait to go to the beach tomorrow...just A and I and Juno.

Strange Dreams and Butterflies

Dude, I had a waking dream this morning. A was getting ready for work, and I was lying in bed with Juno talking to him with my eyes closed. He disappeared to trim his beard, and just before I nodded off, I had this flash of a silhouetted hand grabbing my mouth. I could tell I was about to nod off because I nearly screamed to consciousness. And in the flash I wasn't looking at myself being grabbed, a hand just locked over my mouth, and it sounded as if cymbals were being crashed.

Since I have no way to manipulate my photos or scans, I have a few posts sitting tight on my dashboard because all the text has to do with the images, ha. I HAVE NEW ARTWORK YAY! But you can't see it because my Photoshop cut out on me. But I can post this:

This is a plate from Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani by Bernard Siegfried Albinus (1747), drawn by Jan Wandelaar. When we visited the Mutter Museum in Philly, I took home this postcard. The original is part of the collection at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

All of the butterflies in our butterfly bungalow emerged...I was surprised. The kit we used had about five chrysalises, and when we took them out of the container, they started shimmying and shaking and wiggling. I'd never seen that before...and the shells looked really viscous and gooey. Nobody would touch them (they were too squirmy and alien), so I volunteered to transfer and attach them to the inside of the tent with safety pins. We had two containers, so now we have ten little fluttering Painted Ladies.

Hellfire and Destruction

Traditional depiction of Satan in scenes of the Last Judgment during the late 15th c.:

Like some kind of diabolical port-a-potty...even though I could elaborate for days on the simile, I won't. See how the ground is divided into parallel levels in the background? The registers remind me of the relief decorations on Roman sarcophagi. They depict the fate of the damned in hell. It seems to combine several of the cardinal sins, the most obvious being gluttony, avarice, and sloth.

Not a whole lot turns up on the internet about Binsfeld's classification of demons in conjunction with the seven deadly sins (but you can always count on Wikipedia), but I thought it was an interesting tangent nonetheless, especially because Beelzebub is the demon associated with gluttony and the fact that the name has come to be synonymous with Satan (in the New Testament). In the Old Testament, however, he was the Philistine god of Ekron 25 miles outside of Jerusalem, his name, which means "lord of the flies," was probably bestowed not because he brought the flies (originally, he was thought to be a sun god, and flies typically pester during the daytime) but because he was invoked to drive away the flies at a sacrifice.