The Carver

See, as the carver carves a rose,

A wing, a toad, a serpent's eye,

In cruel granite, to disclose

The soft things that in hardness lie,

So this one, taking up his heart,

Which time and change had made a stone,

Carved out of it with dolorous art,

Laboring yearlong and alone,

The thing there hidden—rose, toad, wing?

A frog's hand on a lily pad?

Bees in a cobweb?—no such thing!

A girl's head was the thing he had,

Small, shapely, richly crowned with hair,

Drowsy, with eyes half closed, as they

Looked through you and beyond you, clear

To something farther than Cathay:

Saw you, yet counted you not worth

The seeing, thinking all the while

How, flower-like, beauty comes to birth;

And thinking this, began to smile.

Medusa! For she could not see

The world she turned to stone and ash.

Only herself she saw, a tree

That flowered beneath a lightning-flash.

Thus dreamed her face—a lovely thing

To worship, weep for, or to break . . .

Better to carve a claw, a wing,

Or, if the heart provide, a snake.

~~~ Conrad Aiken, 1889-1973

Branestorm

This is an old scribble I did a few years ago. It's painted on waxed palette paper with the remnants of the paints that I used for another painting. At the time I felt this one piece was related to the books I was reading on brane theories. That's the highly speculative hypothesis that there exists parallel realities to ours that exist within the same universe, enacting every possible permutation of existence forever and never all at once. Just like an amoeba in a pond has no sense of the third dimension, we have no way to sense this fourth (not time) dimension, save for very rare occasions when branes (the candy shell coating of a particular reality) overlap. Some even believe that the Big Bang occured when two universal branes overlapped, and the energy transfer betwixt them spun into a new creation... This would mean that it's possible that every moment, every decision that you make, every changing nuance creates the tiniest bang that may create it's own universal reality (which in turn is full of a brane system).

It sure makes my brane hurt.

Xenoscape

This one came out more like a doodle. I have no clue what I've painted here. The camera isn't able to photograph the 3d effect between layers of the varnish. The colors look much more vibrant and glossy in person.
Until I find out why I painted this one, it gets a temporary title... it's an alien jungle... a xenoscape maybe.

Arcane Algebra

I just finished this small paint sketch on paper using acrylic. There's no real story for this one, only some vague notion of a dead man calculating matters with alien concepts... like angelic mathematics. And I picture it set to anxious music like a plinky Bartok string quartet.

Flowers of Darkness

After tattooing several poppies, I decided to paint some this week. Completed this one in the round! in acrylic. I didn't waste any time on it. It's halfass week.

Paul Newman narrated this documentary on the papaver plant called "Flowers of Darkness" which traces the history of the plant's medicinal and abusive uses.... It is said that the poppy made its way to Europe via the caravan of Genghis Khan in the 12th century. Khan sowed seed wherever his conquests led him, ensuring that the white blossoms that flowered the next year would mark his territory and the path that led him there. After one very decisive and utterly bloody battle, and entire field of the white poppies was stained red, and thereafter all the poppies of Khan's region grew red. This is how the red poppy came to symbolize the sorrows of war.

Vision of Judgement II

"Form`d a sepulchral melo-drame.

Of all The fools who flack`s to swell or see the show,

Who cared about the corpse? The funeral

Made the attraction, and the black the woe.

There throbbed not there a thought which pierced the pall;

And when the gorgeous coffin was laid low,

It seamed the mockery of hell to fold

The rottenness of eighty years in gold."

~~ canto X, Lord Byron's Vision of Judgement.

Vision of Judgement

"The Angels were all singing out of tune,

And hoarse with having little else to do,

Excepting to wind up the sun and moon

Or curb a runaway star or two,

Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon

Broke out of bounds o'er the ethereal blue,

Splitting some planet with its playful tail,

As boats are sometimes by a wanton whale."

~~ Canto II, from Lord Byron's Vision of Judgement.

Tattooed Tulips

Did these tulips on a woman's side... the leaves are not my work.

Reynard at War

It's 4am and I've just finished this painting of a French soldier with a pet fox. The source photo was from the New York Times, February 11th, 1917.

painted in acrylics on cardboard.

Custom Shoes 2

Custom shoes

Treacherous

I regret painting this piece on palette paper. I had just finished a canvas painting when I noticed that the colors I had spread on my wax paper palette were really pleasant and they began to form an image in my head. I borrowed the midsection of the figure from an old Victorian woodcut and the rest I cooked up as a pandemonious party raged around me. When I was done with the piece I sprayed it with a heavy varnish and pinned it to the prize wall.

Somehow it became stacked with a few other paintings in another bedroom of my house and the summer heat melted layers of varnish on the palette paper to the back of some old cardboard art. Seperating the two resulted in the destruction of this poor piece... the one I always called "Treacherous".