Thursday, June 30, 2011

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Work in Progress


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

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Friday, June 24, 2011

Thursday, June 23, 2011

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.


Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Monday, June 20, 2011

Friday, June 17, 2011

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.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Monday, June 13, 2011

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

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. 

Monday, June 6, 2011

Cardinal

Acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12"


Thursday, June 2, 2011

Wednesday, June 1, 2011