Corvux Bigelow

Last year about this time, I was hiking around Mt. Bigelow. I was struck by how sound carries around up there, the radio towers and the primitive feel of the pines. My consciousness was altered in a way that I can't quite put my finger on. I spent most of the day circling around the peak hunting a composition and stopping for periods in the shade to get a feeling of place. There were workmen climbing the towers doing maintenance. You could hear their walkie talkies going off. A band of ravens perched near me and started speaking. Normal low squawks, bumpy chuckles and sometimes almost human noises.

This is an expansion of the therianthropy series of 5 paintings I did last year. The artwork is 16" x 32" in oil. I completed this in March but it took a while for me to go and get it scanned. My next paintings will be smaller, around 11"x17". I have a show in September with Mykl Wells at Michael Contreras Gallery, so I'll be busy this summer.

Canix

Doing a sketch for a new drawing, halfway through a slow-going landscape painting (needing 4 hour blocks of time at a shot) and 5 other inks that need coloring, I decided to finish up coloring on Canix tonight.  Based on a oil painting of the coyote-headed man, but this time in a landscape.  I don't get a huge amount of feedback on my inks, but I draw what I want to see.  I've come to accept my scratchy technique and like it a lot.  Maybe this will develop.

Therianthropy

Timidix

I was offered a show at Art House Centro in Tucson and had a little over a month to get some work together.  I decided to extend the one painting series I had started two years ago that started with "Cervidex," an image of a man with a deer head.  Continuing on the therianthropic path with Ardeidix, Timidix, Canix, and Astutix.  My pantheon of deities all end in "X."  These are my first attempts at figure painting, which is hard for me, which is why I think I avoided it for so long, or until I had the skills.  Always had the ideas, but not the skills.  Turned out to be kind of a mental trick along the lines of "you can paint realistic rocks, the figure is just a weird rock."

So a human with an animal head is a common theme throughout history and presently for that matter.  I am thinking more about variations on the Green Man than Egyptian gods like Osiris, Horus and Anubis.  Spirits of the natural world.  Although I have so much interest recently in mythology, arcane magic, psionics and ancient texts etc., I see these characters appearing in real life now, not in historic situations.  I see a naked, hyper intelligent God with a deer head materializing in front of me with beams of energy washing out of them.  Now.  The embodiment of natures' power and personality, warning, or simply stating their existence in the parking lot, in an abandoned gravel lot, on a path in the desert, on a mountain top.  I see them now, in 2014 while my iPhone notifies me of a text message.

I still feel like all of my artistic efforts are moving towards a publication, and I'm afraid of straying from that subject.  The Sutra of Tranquility.  This book appears to those ready to study out of thin air when summoned.  Filled with abstract patterns, complex diagrams, strange characters, and indecipherable text, the reader comes away with a sense of calm they can call upon the rest of their life.  A fantasy object I can't tear my mind away from but I feel like I'm the one to author it.

Cervidex

Ardeidix

Canix

Astutix