Toad

Work in Progress

My latest comic (graphic novella?) is almost done! Deadline is looming fast.

Another Tanager

Evening Grosbeak

Warbler

Tui

Book Review: "Robert Schumann: Herald of a 'New Poetic Age' "

A great biography and a fascinating appreciation of Schumann's work. Schumann was one of the great musical geniuses of the Romantic movement, and his contributions to musical form were unique and bizarre. Daverio is especially adept at pointing out the mastery in Schumann's often overlooked large-scale later works like "Scenes from Goethe's Faust" or "Das Paradies und die Peri", finding no loss in quality due to Schumann's supposed mental illness. Ear-opening and thought-provoking, delves into Schumann's literary interests (Jean-Paul, Hoffmann, Goethe, etc.) and illuminates the ways in which he endeavored to create a new musical-literary poetics (a line of thinking that would arguably culminate in Wagner's music dramas). A great read, and it made me think differently about the way I create my own art.

Tanager

Owl

Falcon

Work in Progress

I'm working on a new portfolio piece, all digital. I'll post it when it's finished--I feel pretty good about how it's turning out thus far.

Skyscape I: Feet

Head

Head

Head

Triptych VIII: "Little Sanctuary"

Open

Closed

Head

Autobibliography

Inspired by a post from David Auerbach, I've listed out (to the best of my admittedly unreliable recollection), the books that have meant the most to me, year by year, through my life thus far. I'd like to expand this into a series of short essays, so as to explain a little about each choice and why it mattered to me at the time. I doubled up on a few, especially between the ages of 19 and 23, when I read like a demon. Anyhow, here they are:

1. Pat the Bunny
2. The Happy Man and His Dump Truck
3. Animals of Buttercup Farm
4. Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak
5. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
6. Andrew Lang Fairy Books / The Nutcracker
7. Pippi Longstocking, by Astrid Lindgren
8. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C S Lewis
9. The Witches, By Roald Dahl
10. The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander
11. Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
12. The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux
13. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo
14. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexander Dumas
15. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
16. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
17. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
18. Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes
19. Tanakh / Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen
20. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer / Stories by Franz Kafka
21. Poems of Shelley / Illuminated Books of William Blake
22. Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust / Ulysses, by James Joyce
23. Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson / Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
24. Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination and the Sufism of Ibn al 'Arabi, by Henry Corbin
25. Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto
26. The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter
27. Don Juan, by Byron
28. Poems, by Fernando Pessoa, et. al. (so far; still have six months and two days to go)

"Avis Alchemicus" Series

This series is about alchemical transformation, a fascinating process. I had always thought it was merely about trying to turn things into gold and get rich quick (and occasionally it was). But, not only was alchemy a forerunner of modern chemistry, it was a deeply spiritual practice. A great book on the subject is Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician In Search Of Myth, by M. E. Warlick. Jung has also written on the subject, and modern scholars interpret alchemy as a process of psychological growth and transformation.


For the series, I started by finding some scraps of wood, meant to be discarded, and set about to transform (alchemy is all about transformation) them into something of beauty and meaning. These four wood blocks came with a table I purchased--they were inserted for packing purposes and intended to be thrown away.


Each of the four paintings embodies a different color, and each color represents one of the four stages of alchemical transformation. The four stages are listed below, with brief descriptions:

• nigredo, blackening (putrefaction): corruption, dissolution. I mixed the paint with ash in this image to represent the burnt-out nature of the beginning of this process. Starting out with nothing, but with the beginnings of a trail (the red string) we can follow all the way to perfection.
• albedo, whitening: purification, burnout of impurity; the moon, female. I represented this with a white egret in moonlight. A little bit of ash remains in the paint.
• citrinitas, yellowing: spiritualization, enlightenment; the sun, male. The goldfinch lives among thorns and hardship, but it's yellow gold light indicates it's proximity to divine Light. The background here is painted with gold.
• rubedo, reddening: unification of man with god, unification of the limited with the unlimited. The red cardinal appears in average daylight. Achieving unity and health allows one to live more fully in the divine light of the everyday world.

It's a beautiful sequence of spiritual growth, and one that resonates with me. 

Triptych VIII: Opening Soon!

Cardinal

Acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12"

Elegant Trogon

Wood Duck

Sunbird