Ego Rid, She Inspires

I've always though there was something essential in names and have always mused on their deeper meanings, searching for clues via numerology and etymology. Some ancient cultures also thought names carried a certain importance and that the knowledge of someone's (or something's) true name conferred power over him, hence the tales of Rumpelstiltskin and Tom Tit Tot.

While looking through a notebook of mine, I rediscovered perhaps another interesting route to investigate the inner workings of a name: the Internet Anagram Server of which a telling anagram is "I, Rearrangement Servant." By setting a few basic parameters and entering your name, you might unearth some interesting, if somewhat cryptic and surreal, phrases. Depending upon the length and letters in your name, you could literally spend all day pondering all of the possible rearrangements, but often there are themes which can be derived from the frequency of certain words in the various anagrams. The following are some of my favorite anagrams of my own name (some punctuation was added at my discretion):

ego rid, she inspires
eroded inspire sigh
a deed perishing rejoins
designed Irish rope
I sing spheroid deer
a ridged spine joins here
oh dig, inspired seer!
his red poising deer
heeding a drip, seers join
inspire his deer God
deer herd is poising
re inspire, God hides
a designer's rejoined hip
drips enjoin deer geisha
oh, inspired ridges!
she inspired God ire
a ridged, serene hip joins

Rabbit Hearted Girl

I caught a fragment from the chorus of Florence & the Machine's "Rabbit Heart(Raise It Up)" on the Y Rock radio show one evening and was pleasantly surprised by the mythic references. Driving home last night I was able to catch the entire song and was further intrigued by the interesting layering of powerful female vocals, snippets of a tinkling harp, and electronic elements (a reviewer on Amazon describes it as a "thunderstorm in a flower garden"). I wasn't sure of the artist or song title, so I googled a lyric from the chorus. Upon discovering the full lyrics and was even more delighted:

Here I am, a rabbit hearted girl
Frozen in the headlights
It seems I've made the final sacrifice

We raise it up, this offering
We raise it up

This is a gift, it comes with a price
Who is the lamb and who is the knife?
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
And turns me to gold in the sunlight

Allusions to literature, a dark transaction, and the shedding of skin — what more could one want in a song? Even the very Pre-Raphaelite influenced video with its frothy whites and thick greens contains the double-edged imagery of the lyrics wherein the feasting table is transformed into a coffin. It's not really surprising to me to find that Florence Welch was an art student prior to initiating her music career.

I was able to download the single via iTunes, but it looks like the full-length CD Lungs has yet to be released in the US. The whole CD seems well worth purchasing after listening to some other songs on her website.

Strange Fairytales on Urban Walls

"Without Their Arms They Were Sisters"

Herakut is the name of the entity created when two street artists chose to merge their talents and create together. Hera + Akut = Herakut. When I first discovered the collaborative work of Herakut in the February 2009 issue of Juxtapoz I was smitten by both their poignant subject matter and the intense contrast between the artists' two styles that somehow still managed to form a remarkable synthesis. Hera's rough, calligraphic strokes are tempered by Akut's smooth and nearly luminescent realism to form figures that seem to simultaneously pool out into the third dimension and etch themselves deep into the surface of a wall or canvas like a neolithic cave painting.

"Streetdart No.2"

The creatures they paint range from the adorable, but often worrysome pug boys to rabbitfolk and even (yay!) wounded deerwomen — and they usually have a tale or piece of social commentary to impart in addition to their visual appeal. They use the animal attributes, masks, and headdresses to symbolize the nature of the figures, and the symbolism is sometimes not what one's initial associations might be: the cute pug boys (and girls?) represent "a street artist in the way that a dog goes around town and shits anywhere he likes. That's real graffiti. That's what dogs do." The rabbits are not just sweet and harmless in their paintings but typically represent an exploited sexuality comparable to the "bunnies" of Playboy notoriety. Their interactions are dystopian fairytales.

Their new book Herakut: The Perfect Merge is a great collection of their work featuring not only finished pieces but preliminary drawings and in-progress photos, allowing one to really appreciate the many layers involved in their art. The following is a quotation from the book about the struggle to retain the initial freshness of a sketch in a finished painting:

Painting from sketch was like copying yourself. Making a bad sequel. Cold coffee. The sketch by itself would always be the fresh spark — but the painting that followed would be like holding your hands to the radiator: it feels like heats but it's no real fire.

But one thought finally opened up the gate to new grounds: (wow, this may sound a little weird but this is how our brains function...) Mary J Blidge — singing about 1st love — album after album after album. How could singers relive this heartfelt experience even decades after they had actually been there? Right there it clicked. A sketch was the tool for capturing a new-born thought, a genuine moment like when you're falling in love. (Intimate, strong, but at the same time fragile and never to be repeated.) [...] So, in the end: a sketch will always be like love at first sight while the pieces that follow make it a love story.

More of Herakut's work can be seen online at:
Herakut (their official website)
Herakut's Dirty Laundry Aired

From Having a Genius to Being a Genius

Author Elizabeth Gilbert discusses the nature of creativity and advocates a more ancient mode of understanding which does not place the individual's ego at the center and acknowledges an Otherworldly source for inspiration:





Thanks to Asharah and her blog Bellydance Paladin for exposing me to this wonderful video!

Fée Intoxicated

Yesterday I picked up a copy of The Book of Celtic Verse edited by John Matthews. Not surprisingly, it contains a number of faery-influenced pieces, including the one below:

"The Others"
by Seumas O'Sullivan (1879 - 1958)

From our hidden places
By a secret path,
We come in the moonlight
To the side of the green rath.

There the night through
We take our pleasure,
Dancing to such a measure
As earth never knew.

To song and dance
And lilt without a name,
So sweetly breathed
'Twould put a bird to shame.

And many a young maiden
Is there, or mortal birth,
Her young eyes laden
With dreams of earth.

And many a youth entranced
Moves slowly in the wildered round,
His brave lost feet enchanted
With the rhythm of faery sound.

Music so forest wild
And piercing sweet would bring
Silence on the blackbirds singing
Their best in the ear of spring.

And now they pause in their dancing,
And look with troubled eyes,
Earth straying children
With sudden memory wise.

They pause, and their eyes in the moonlight
With faery wisdom cold,
Grow dim and a thoughts goes fluttering
In the hearts no longer old.

And then the dream forsakes them,
And sighing, whispering turn anew,
As the whispering music takes them,
To the dance of the elfin crew.

O many a thrush and blackbird
Would fall to the dewy ground,
And pine away in silence
For envy of the sound.

So the night through
In our sad pleasure,
We dance to many a measure,
That earth never knew.

Capturing the Elusive with the Stroke of a Brush

Artwork of fey-creatures and shape-shifters for your appreciation:

• Bacchanalian Scene by Richard Dadd
My first glimpse of this painting was as thumbnail image of the cover of Loreena McKennitt's To Drive the Cold Winter Away, and I was immediately captivated. I'm seriously considering this image for my first tattoo. Thalia Took, an artist herself, has scribed some beautiful and entirely apropos words to describe his work:

Dadd was a Victorian fairy painter who in his early twenties developed schizophrenia/severe bi-polar disorder and then murdered his father. He spent the rest of his life in an institution, where he continued painting. Some, not all, of his paintings have a fey, alien quality to them. The best I can say is that his humans are not human, and have a genuine wildness to them, a deep unconsciousness, impartial and malevolent, like looking into the eyes of a leopard. Gorgeous yet disturbing. Very compelling.

I doubt that I could have described it better myself.

• The Bacchante or Head of a Woman with the Horns of a Ram by Jean-Léon Gérome
This painting verges on being stark, but the delicate folds in the Bacchante's sleeve and the aching curves of the horns endow it with a surprising sensitivity.

• Birthday by Dorothea Tanning
I had the pleasure of discovering this painting in person at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where it inhabits the Modern and Contemprary Galleries. This .jpeg reproduction does the painting little justice. While it is a surrealist self-portrait, it nevertheless seems to possess the taint of fey. The artist, in her tendril-adorned dress, reveals a series of open doors stretching to infinity. Her strange, winged familiar is poised by her feet.

• Lavinia, Deer, and Rabbit by Sam Weber
I discovered the work of this artist in the 2006 Illustration annual of Communication Arts magazine. I am enamored with his technique of rendering trees, a method which gives the impression that he glues elegant pieces of driftwood directly to the paper. Upon visiting his website, I was delighted to find animal-people among his subjects. His sketch of "Rabbit" reveals something of a trickster character. (I couldn't resist including "Deer" in this list, because, well - it's an illustration of deer!)

• Flidais by Forest Rogers
I was guided to the remarkable work of Forest Rogers some time ago through a link on the Endicott Studio webpage, but I had not visited her site recently (shame on me!). I was again guided back to her amazing figurative sculptures/art dolls through the Endicott Studio and discovered this piece which especially tugs at my heartstrings: Flidais a simply gorgeous rendition of a WhiteDeerWoman. She is the artist's vision of a Celtic Goddess of wild creatures and sexual potency. Be sure to view all of the photos in this gallery otherwise you may be apt to miss some lovely details. Her feet are particularly well conceived - at first glance it might appear as if she simply has her toes curled in an interesting fashion, but this is not the case. Her creations possess a Pre-Raphaelite beauty which I really appreciate, and her commentary is also intelligent. She has an all-around great website which I highly recommend.

• Faun by Lou Rogers
This remarkable painting was created by sculptor Forest Roger's late mother. Evidently artistic talent runs in the family!

• First Blessing by Dawn Wilson-Enoch
Fresh out of college Dawn emerged as a fantasy book cover illustrator. Although she gained renown for her work in that field, the type of art required of her in that career became spiritually draining. She now creates visionary paintings and jewelry based upon the landscape surrounding her New Mexico home. First Blessing is a piece partially inspired by the work of another artist enchanted with the desert southwest, Windling's novel The Wood Wife.