Ancestors

Wow. I've really been slacking on updating this blog. My apologies! I have a few things I've been wanting to post about so a couple of entries should be forthcoming.

I've been working on this piece on & off for about 2 years. I'm not sure what to title it yet so I'm tentatively calling it "Ancestors" for now. My ACEO Huldre was the precursor to this image. It's rare that I will deliberately choose to depict the same figure twice, but this particular one was really calling out for a more thorough treatment. You can also see an in-progress shot here.

The main figure is my own personal interpretation of Frau Holda ghostly emerging from the mound. The image gives the impression of being a scene from a bygone time, but upon closer inspection there are modern elements to elude to the fact that She's not just a figure from the past.

Media include: ballpoint pen, colored pencils, watercolor, and colored inks on toned paper. In the detail image below all of the delightful creatures were rendered in black ballpoint pen.

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.

The White Doe Speaks

A number of months ago a poet shared a piece with me that was inspired by one of my drawings. As the Fates would have it, I was lucky enough to check my junk mail folder that day, otherwise it would have been lost to me among the oblivion of dross which normally (and thankfully) gets sorted into that location. I expressed my gratitude and appreciation for the beautiful words and asked if I might be able to post his piece along with my image somewhere. Unfortunately, I did not hear back from him (maybe my letter to him was gobbled up by his own spam filter, or perhaps he did reply and the Fates chose not to favor me a second time).

Perhaps the time was just not right, but with the new Summer 2008 edition of Goblin Fruit, the White Doe speaks:

I pull the landscape
into folds across my back,
a kimono of land and water.
To feel a leaf with one shoulder
or tree roots buried in earth
is a sacred thing
and cannot be imagined.

- spoken through the grace of Joshua Gage

I'd also like to take this opportunity to join the editors of Goblin Fruit in saying a fond farewell to The Endicott Studio which has been nurturing mythopoetic arts for the number of years as there are letters in my full name (a figure which also coincides with the day of my birth). I am too poor a writer to properly express how influential and inspirational the Endicott Studio has been for me, and I will miss it sorely. Thank you Terri and Midori!

My Art is being featured at the Endicott Studio blog!

I am thrilled beyond belief!
I commented on an entry at the Endicott Studio blog yesterday regarding a poem about a DeerWoman and included links to two of my DeerWoman-based pieces. To my immense delight delight and honor, Terri Windling chose to highlight both of those images and my artwork in general in today's blog entry! You can read the entry yourself if you like: November 13, 2006.

If there ever was an occasion that warranted a "Squeakers of joy!" this is certainly it!

Sympathies

"I'm often called a 'fantasy' painter," Brian notes, "but my imagery springs from myth, folklore and the old oral story–telling tradition, not from the modern fantasy genre — although I'm grateful for the support that fantasy readers have given me over the years. I have to confess that, unlike Wendy, I rarely read fiction at all. Most of my reading is nonfiction: history, mythology, archetypal psychology and the like. I prefer the enchantment of a story told rather than one that is written down. In the oral tradition, where stories are told around the fireplace in semi–darkness, the words are alive: they leave the lips, enter into the air and before they fall onto your ear they transform themselves into magic. They're not fixed; they change from telling to telling, and from listener to listener. I want my pictures to have that same quality of mutability. I don't want things to be fixed too solidly or explained too fully; I want each viewing to be like a re–telling of a tale, full of new possibilities." [. . .]

"I find that some fantasy genre painters tend to over–paint their pictures; they're a bit too . . .over–wrought for my taste. When I look at them I find them much too bright and shiny. The artist has finished every detail, and every edge is hard and bright — which doesn't allow me into their world, my eye slides right off that shiny surface. I prefer to keep the rendering as loose as possible, just on the edge of being finished. I want a painting to give just enough information for the picture to make sense; there should always be a little bit kept back, a few pieces missing, which the viewer must supply himself. In doing that, the picture comes to life. It becomes part of a reciprocal process, a communication. The painting allows you inside, where it can grow, and you can grow."

- Brian Froud as quoted in an essay by Terri Windling, Brian Froud: Portrait Painter to the Fairies

I both sympathize and emphathize.

Hope in Peripheral Shimmering

Counterpoint. Just as I was again losing hope in the whole prospect of art relating to Faery, I found myself being led down various paths and discovering a section of the Endicott Studio I had not visited before. Although I am familiar with Oliver Hunter's art and writings, these journal entries of his are brand new to me (if you are unfamiliar with his creations, I highly recommend that you remedy that by visiting the journal link, A Cupfull of Oliver, or the remnants of his former website at Muse Hill):

"In a metamorphosis of states, the Invisible — a word, a character, a point of view — dresses ceremoniously in the garb of the visible as a disguise. Faery as an ocean is unfathomable; a strange and green ocean. Cocteau allies himself with the Invisible. He would have us believe, not only that there is an invisible existence, but that he too is a creature of this element. I may be writing this out of jealousy that my bones don't harbour as much, but then again, I don't necessarily want them to. I am content in my humanness, I don't trace my lineage in the hopes of finding mystics or demigods — it feels too uncomfortably melodramatic. My relationship with the invisible, with Faery, is one of carefully considered distance and respect. I don't presume to know its innermost facets; I know that such presumptuousness is delusion, a dangerous position in which I am liable to invoke the wrath of the unknown. But I also stress that neither is this relationship one of superstition, which implies that my attitude might be unreasonable and born from ignorance. I do not weaken the Invisible by dismissing its existence as nonsense, but nor do I demonically wrap myself up in its cape, laughing at the rest of the world in its petty mortal state. Quite simply, I take the invisible seriously. I attempt to meet it on its own terms. It is not such a silly thing to believe, as Ljerka once mentioned to me, in the 'connectedness of all things.'

Invisible connections, then what does this have to do with painting? I'm looking across the riddled treetops of Faery, hunting for something — not a secret exactly (not something to be made visible), but a sign, a directive to action. This is cheapened by giving Faery an opaque and fathomable character because it places the (human) author in an omnipresent position, which does not and cannot apply in the case of the invisible. The best ghost stories are written from a limited perspective, where the unknown retains its dignity by cloaking its motives (if indeed it has any at all) in darkness and doubt. The invisible maintains this essential invisibility even when disguising itself, as Cocteau points out, in the semblance of the visible. But underneath the forms of the faeries are leaf mold and moss (pigment, binder and canvas). These visible forms are like garments in that they contain clues for the human to interpret. We are wrong if we attempt to unveil the invisibles by these clues, for by nature they are consistently inconsistent. They are monstrously convoluted messages about ourselves."

In these two paragraphs, he has expressed eloquently something I with which I was verbally struggling in my ruminations on mythic art (see previous entry). I have in my own notes that "fantasy artist tend to depict mythical beings, creatures, etc. as if they are corporal, flesh-and-blood whereas mythic artists are inclined to depict them visualizations of symbolic traits, as emanations/representations of generally non-ordinary beings. Within fantasy artwork, creatures like dragons, elves, etc. are shown and conceived of just as humans and other animals are." I wasn't satisfied with the manner in which I attempted to impart the real concept I had in mind, so I left that section out. Oliver Hunter bore to the heart of what I intended to say: "I'm looking across the riddled treetops of Faery, hunting for something — not a secret exactly (not something to be made visible), but a sign, a directive to action. This is cheapened by giving Faery an opaque and fathomable character because it places the (human) author in an omnipresent position, which does not and cannot apply in the case of the invisible."

Exactly. Mythic art is deeply involved in what it conceals and reveals, and it acknowledges that it cannot reveal everything and thus leaves potent space for the viewer (and indeed the artist him or herself) to probe. On the other hand, fantasy art tends to be extremely concerned with forming every detail of costume, motive, character, language, landscape - the artist seeks to build an entire, meticulously-ordered, pre-determined, self-contained world inside their own skull. The creatures and characters in fantasy artwork are entirely solid: although in one particular image we might not be able to see the underbelly of some great, lolling beast, there is no doubt that the artist has conceived the texture and color of that underbelly.

When I utilized the term solid in the previous sentence to refer to creatures in fantasy artwork, it was not to suggest that the mythic is in all manifestations non-physical, non-tactile. Physical, tactile things have their mythic aspects. Deer, for instance, are real creatures which exist in our ordinary, so-called objective reality. One can touch them, dissect them, even ingest them, yet for all of that we cannot deny their mythic quality (i.e. the Invisible facet of which Oliver speaks and the "mystery" Joseph Campbell refers to in the quotations in my previous entry): "Craving the dialect of cities, I forgot the way deer steal into the yard with their big hearts and fragile dreams. I wasn't here to follow their gaunt, level eyes, or the staggering poetry of their hooves" (Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses). Mythic artwork is engrossed with somehow imparting the "staggering poetry of their hooves;" fantasy tends to depict its subjects, whether "real" or "imaginary" with the fervor of scientific illustration.

Kakuzo Okakura writes in his The Book of Tea that "[i]n leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up to the full measure of your aesthetic emotion." This is why East Asian artists are often seen as the masters of empty space, why their landscapes often writhe in a mist that defines the majority of the composition as seemingly empty, allowing the character of the paper itself to become part of the painting. Personally though, I disagree with Okakura's use of the term "vacuum" in reference to those significant, ill-defined places - at least in the context of mythic artwork. A vacuum to me implies void, nothingness, whereas I believe in actuality those ill-defined places are in fact quite the opposite: teeming with possibilities simply because they do not provide such distinct limitations to the viewer. Those spaces are "blank" or vague not because they represent lack, but because the artist comes to terms with the fact that her splay of many-hued leads, her wells of jewel-like ink, impressive as they are, do not contain the liminal, shimmering colors necessary to truly "complete" the tableau. And as Oliver stated, it would only cheapen the subject to suppose that one could render the mythic in its entirety.

When I posted my drawing of The CatfishWoman to my Epilogue gallery, one individual wrote that by choosing to crop the figure of the faery as I had was teasing the viewer, "Your description of her only makes me want to see how you would draw the rest of her. What you have here is quite a tease!" When I posted the same drawing in my Elfwood gallery, someone commented that judging by what portions of her anatomy could be perceived in this image, she was far too human to be considered adequately within fantasy genre and he expressed that the image was lacking. I responded, "I agree that I have not pushed the boundaries as far as I could have regarding her degree of catfishiness, but the representation felt right to me at the time and I'm still pleased with how it turned out. I envision her as a shapeshifter who can embody a broad range of forms between wholly human and wholly catfish. Perhaps I will depict her in another piece in an aspect closer to the catfish end of the spectrum. The way I chose to frame and compose this piece should also be taken into consideration. Perhaps her arms and torso lead off the page and form elegant fins, perhaps not. I like giving the viewer room to put their own imagination to use. Someone over at my Epilogue gallery commented that this image was a 'tease' since I didn't show her in her entirety, and in a way they're quite right, and I personally think the image might become too dull and predictable if I just handed the viewer all of the information."

Shimmering peripheries. Potent spaces. Although they can be embodied in the clean absence of pigment in Chinese ink paintings, I believe there are other manners of allowing potentiality, ambiguity, mystery into one's artwork, more ways than I could possibly enumerate.

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In other news, I have a new friend! :D A recent trip to Skippack, Pennsylvania introduced me to a small shop which included among its wares a collection of Native American style flutes. Tsunami flutes to be precise. I hit it off with a lovely flute in the key of F, its body crafted of Tulip Poplar and its bird/block/fetish of Palownia. The natural tone of both woods is quite light: a pale flute for a pale girl. I have a particular affinity with Tulip Poplar as that species of tree populates much of the land surrounding my home. (Tulip Poplar spires wreath my Horned God's brow and a Tulip Poplar leaf-pen entwine my Green Lady's hair.)

Well, that's enough writing for one night I think!