Woven

I was contacted late last year by Jeremy from Upholstery (a local band on my friend Katy’s record label) about doing a cover for their new album Woven. If you ever wondered how to get me to take a commission, the best possible thing to do is send me a list of influences and touch points that all happen to be my interests, and that was the case here. Among the influences for the record was the Laki eruption, burning trees, “ash dark and bitter haze”, byssus, a well with poisonous water, and omens and portents of doom, all things I would generally have clattering around in my head anyway. I’ve mentioned this before elsewhere, but I’m really fascinated by natural disasters, comets and other unusual occurrences being read as omens, especially ones in the ancient or medieval world which were documented across really wide geographic areas and across cultures. I’ve taken inspiration from the Augsburgh Book of Miracles for previous work and it was a really useful foundation for coming up with this image too.

When I first started sketching I was really focused on doing something about the Laki eruption of 1783, an incredibly apocalyptic event that poisoned the soil and air, caused a global temperature drop, and crop failure. Contemporaneous descriptions of the experience outside of Iceland describe strange storms, mysterious haze and fog, poisoned air, the sun blotted out and blood red all day, and strange winds, bitter cold and crop failure. Within Iceland the massive burst of fluorine gas poisoned people, soil, grass and then livestock leading to a grueling famine.

The Reverend Jón Steingrímsson gave this account of his experience in Fires of the Earth “This past week, and the two prior to it, more poison fell from the sky than words can describe: ash, volcanic hairs, rain full of sulfur and saltpeter, all of it mixed with sand. The snouts, nostrils, and feet of livestock grazing or walking on the grass turned bright yellow and raw. All water went tepid and light blue in color and gravel slides turned grey. All the earth's plants burned, withered and turned grey, one after another, as the fire increased and neared the settlements.” The reverend is famous for his eldmessa (fire mass) in which the lava flow diverted away from a church where parishioners had gathered to pray. To me it is probably mostly a little bit of christian propagranda, but visually and conceptually it really seemed to fit the themes of the album, or any project of art making in end times and this was the original concept I focused on.

Here’s my first sketch: The place I really got myself stuck however was in trying to come up with a structure or other object that would stand in for the church in the story, not wanting to be too literal or make something that read as a church. In the sketch the…egg? shape was just meant to be a stand in, but in all my sketching I just never came up with a clear picture and realized I had run my imagination into a bit of a dead end. I was also a little tired of just landscapes after the MtG series and wanted a reason to do something a bit less simplified

I was staying at cabin for my partners birthday while I was stuck on this sketch and I had grabbed “The Forest in Folklore and Mythology” by Alexander Porteous to bring with me just because it’s a good book to pick up and put down and happened across a blurb about the Melusine that I had forgotten about. For those not familiar the Melusine story is of a certain type; a supernatural creature or deity taking a human lover with the stipulation that they not be viewed at certain times. The weak human can’t resist a peek and having broken their promise their supernatural lover flees. The story of Cupid and Psyche is of a smilar type, but there are also several about faery wives. What I had forgotten was that the Melusine also functions sort of like a fetch or banshee. “…he violated his oath, whereupon Melusina told him that, obedient to the decree of destiny, she would have to leave him and flit about the earth as a spectre in pain and suffering until the day of doom. She would only become visible when one of his race was about to die at Lusignan, her parting words being ‘But one thing will I say to thee before I part, that thou, and those who for more than a hundred years shall succeed thee, shall know that whenever I am seen to hover over the fair castle of Lusignan, then will it be certain that in that very year the castle will get a new lord; and though people may not perceive me in the air yet they will see me by the Fountain of Thirst…” I painted a Melusine once, almost 10 years ago now, and I’ve always wanted to paint another one and I realized that I could incorporate this into what I was working on with the running theme of portents of doom, and my whole conception of how to design the image changed.

Here’s my initial pencil sketch. Once I saw this more clearly like a surreal apparition, I felt like I could really start to build detail in the background and incorporate some more imagery that Jeremy had mentioned, like the burning tree and a well (the Melusine is also often associated with a sacred well) and using the Melusine’s head to create a sort of eclipse in front of the burning sun. I wanted the design of the creature to be a bit androgenous, and I was imagining something to the way the more abstract visions of angels would appear.

I’ll admit one of my worst traits is my total refusal to plan (and this goes well outside my art making) but the past few years I’ve been forced by the reality of working for clients to actually produce color sketches. I mostly enjoy finding a color story as I go, and I’ve always thought some of my odder choices which are probably the result of creating little problems and puzzles for myself gave things a certain charm. I will admit now though that planning all the color in advance with colored pencils made this painting process so incredibly easy. Normally I would stall out on an area and just sort of pace around my house deliberating what color something should be, but this time I had everything so planned that all I had to do was execute, which is really what I enjoy most.

And here’s the final painting!

While the record is digital only, Jeremy designed a very cool lyric book and this image will be the cover. I made some scans of some of my favorite images from my copy of the Book of Miracles and these are scattered throughout as well. They have a record release show this friday, and you can find their new album on their bandcamp once it’s officially released!

As I started to write this entry on Monday news was filtering in about a train derailment on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania (I live in Philly), which like so many disasters is the product of the abuses and negligence inherent to capitalism. The choice was made to do a “controlled” release and burn off of ten cars filled with toxic chemicals, which will no doubt have a horrifying effect on the human, animal and plant populations in the surrounding area for an untold number of years. I couldn’t help thinking of the parallels between the poisonous clouds of Laki and what happened this week and the incredibly apocalyptic images and videos people took of the toxic burning cloud visible from their homes have an eerie synchronicity with images from the Book of Miracles. The portents are ongoing I suppose.

Image from the Augsburg Book of Miracles with the caption “In the year 1542 a fire in the sky was seen here in Augsburg, burning like a great Brazier in the clouds at midnight, which many trustworthy people saw for a long time”

Image taken from a family farm by twitter user BusyBusyBee2

Twelfth (and final!) MtG card Sagittarius/Forest

I’m as confused as the next person about how 12 months have passed but it would appear they have because the final card is now out, and it’s the second Forest! When I was originally contacted to do these they were concieved and executed back to back in just a few months in the order I had the designs finalized but if my memory is correct this WAS actually the last one I finished. I was working on it while away in a snowy cabin a friend’s family lent us use of so I could get out of the house I’d been more or less trapped in for most of 2020. I didn’t know when I made these that they wouldn’t be released all at once either, and weirdly having them come out slowly over the year has kind of helped to strengthen what is for me a new understanding of the zodiac as a way to map the passage of time in some sort of yearly cycle.

Sagittarius is associated with an adventurous spirit and a willingness to venture into the unknown, and as a result (to me at least) its position at the turn of the year in many parts of the world corresponds well to the feeling of some sort of passage or feeling of nervous anticipation Where I live it’s also one of our first truly cold months, the begining of a long dragging semi-hibernation period.

I wanted both forest paintings to have an element of passage or portal to them. The Taurus forest was meant to evoke the hazy fertile spring period, the bulls crescent marking an opening out of the forest into a field whith the sun bursting through. The Sagitarius forest is the opposite, looking deep into the dark unknown of a tunnel of trees. The form of the forest floor was inspired by a scene from a movie I love, Tarkovsky’s Stalker (based on a book I love, Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky). in which a pair of men are led by an experienced “stalker” through the mysterious and treacherous “zone” in search of a room that reveals and grants your deepest desire to you.

When trying to think about how to incorporate both the element of fire and some of the traditional iconography of the sign into the painting my first thought was of the ignis fatuus/will-o’-the-wisp a spectral flame which lures travelers down dark paths at night after some potentially unreachable goal. The design of the flame sprite was based on both the drawn bow and arrow of the centaur Chiron and designs of antique iron weathervanes. It occurred to me that the arrow makes particular sense for both characteristics of the sign and directional compasses and weathervanes since an arrow travels in front of you as you shoot it, maybe landing somewhere that will ultimately be your destination. It made me think a part of a Robin Hood adaptation that was very impactful for me in childhood where a dying Robin lays in bed and shoots and arrow, instructing Little John to bury his body where it lands.

The Passing of Robin Hood by N.C. Wyeth

A completely unintentional similarity that has brought me great joy was pointed out by my friend Morgaine. I can’t say I did this on purpose but now that it’s been pointed out this thing will always have the voice of the extremely high and radiant Mr. Burns.

Like Scorpio this card originally felt a bit incongruent with the rest when I made it, but seeing it in it’s proper place as the last card I think it’s actually kind of appropriate. I’m sort of sad to see the series end but also really excited to spend some more time on my personal projects which I’m looking forward to writing about more now that I’m back in the habit.

This week I’m wrapping up a record cover design which I’ll do a little write up of eventually, and then I’ll be working on artists proofs for my first batch of comissions and finally painting my last two new Gogol illustrations which I’m VERY excited to finish. If you want to be added to the wait list for the next batch of APs contact Donny. In the meantime I still have a Bigcartel with some zines and prints and I’ve updated by Inprnt with almost all of the card prints.

I’ll leave you with a final recommendation, this really beautiful book of the Tarot of Leonora Carrington, which I’ve been slowly working my way through and getting very inspired by. Also this month I discovered via an essay in Hellebore that she did the art direction for the Mansion of Madness, a movie by Juan Lopez Moctezuma (best known for Alucarda probably) and tracked it down. Well worth watching if you are a fan of her work across mediums.

Eleventh MtG card Scorpio/Swamp

Apologies for the late entry, this is a busy time of year for me! The Scorpio card which is the second Swamp card released a couple weeks ago now.

Again, my perspective on swamps and the connection with swamp cards in MtG to death relates to the fecundity of these environments, where dead rotting matter is constantly turned over into new life. I was inspired by time spent in one of my favorite places in the world, the NJ Pine Barrens. The Pine Barrens are full of carnivorous bog plants, namely pitchers and sun dews, and because this happens to be my partner’s sign and this is a place we go together a lot it just leapt to the front of my mind. There’s also an element of danger to these plants, which entice passing insects only to trap and drown them, and I felt like that was fitting for a sign that is both legendarily spicy and connected to a dangerous little creature like the scorpion. Of course scorpions don’t live in swamps, quite the opposite as they’re dry desert creatures, but that’s okay because this is not a nature documentary and those are giant tree scaling fantasy scorpions. So don’t worry.

The sign is associated with the color red. While red isn’t dominant on any of the other cards I felt like I should incorporate it into this design so I tried to make it a sort of apocalyptic poison swamp with a dominating red sky. The color scheme overall is quite different from the others, relying more heavily on primary colors and a lot of deep greens but it’s hard to balance making 12 individual paintings seem connected but different enough to be interesting on their own. Scorpio is associated with passion, in every sense of the word so both the aforementioned fertility of the swamp and the danger of the elements seemed to fit for me. Scorpio is a water sign, while Capricorn, the other swamp card, is an earth sign, which is fitting as swamps are both mineral rich and incredibly wet.

The reason I’m getting to this entry so late is because this sign happens to contain two dates I always have creative projects around; Halloween and my partner Mike’s bday. For Halloween the past however many years I’ve made elaborate paper mache masks as a personal project. Here’s last year’s Humbaba mask:

This years was maybe my most ambitious, an idea I got two weeks before Halloween and finished a couple days before. This is my version of one of the two fancifully (incorrectly) reconstructed statues known as the Minoan Snake Goddess. It’s made out of paper mache, paper clay, cardboard, rope, paint and glitter paper and the small snakes are made with crayola Model Magic. The color and some of the details like the earrings are based on Minoan frescoes rather than the original statue.

My second project was Mike’s present. I live for making weird things to delight my loved ones, and this year I made Mike a mini paper mache Scabby the rat as he’s a hero in our household. We recently got some face time with him while spending time on the picket line with the PMA Union as part of their successful strike!

This October also marked my 3rd year participating in SpiralQ’s PeopleHood a genuinely beautiful and chaotic people’s parade which brings activist groups and neighbors together to make props and puppets for a big loud procession through West Philly. While I didn’t have as much time to contribute to making things as previous years because of my work schedule I did manage to help make a big new banner for Shut Down Berks and build these big flapping bat puppets for the campaign to save the Meadows at FDR park from deforestation and development. I got to pilot one of the bats in the parade! If you don’t know about SpiralQ, check them out, maybe sign up to make regular donations to support their amazing work. You can see photos of this years parade by Philly photographer Joe Piette here.

I have a bunch of projects I’ve been saying I’ll finish that are in states of semi completion mostly because I keep getting distracted by paper mache and also taking the time every month to write about and make mini paintings for these MtG drops, but next month is the LAST CARD! Going foward I’ll start opening up proof commissions but I’ll also hopefully be completing a number of other non Magic related commissions and finally finish an almost finished zine I’ve been chipping away at all year.

Just some final recommendations; if you’re interested in learning more about the NJ Pine Barrens I suggest this beautiful John McPhee book. Also check out this article Kim Kelly wrote about the Pine Barren’s most notorious boy, the Jersey Devil.

Tenth MtG card Libra/Plains

Marking the passage of time this year by these card releases has been exceedingly weird, and I can’t believe we’re already at 10. The Libra/Plains card dropped this tuesday which makes it the 3rd and final air sign. Like I mentioned with Aquarius and Gemini the unifying element for all three of these is the stylized sky, and this one is probably the fussiest of the three.

Libra was a bit confusing for me. As far as the classic symbology goes, the scales being an object rather than a creature or human form was always a little underwhelming, and when I puzzled over how to hint at it while also incorporating some aspect of the element air I wasn’t sure what the right approach was at first. Talking to Maya was really helpful here, because when I was thinking of the scales I was imagining something placid, unmoving and suspended in perfect balance. But as they explained it Libra, the scales, and the symbology around justice has more to do with turmoil. Something more akin to a perpetual struggle and conflict to find equilibrium. This is what gave me the idea of incorporating the element of air as a tornado, which was also appropriate to the land type of plains, the scales being represented by toppled, re-formed and eroded stones.

I mentioned him before but in doing my research for this project I found an artist I now love, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis who had his own series of paintings of the signs of the zodiac as symbolist landscapes. After talking to Maya I looked back over his piece and realized his representation of Libra played exactly on the aspects and feeling they described to me, better than mine could really! He represented the cups of the scales continually tilting in a turbulent sea

Libra was actually the first card I painted, because it was the first fully approved sketch and I needed to paint as quickly as possible for this project. My sketch is funny for this one because I have a note to “use color scheme from that screensaver” and from my memory this was a photo that came up on the preloaded carousel of images that plays on my tv while it’s idle. I have a habit of grabbing color ideas from absolutely everywhere, and the images usually have nothing to do with what I’m painting, they’re usually just some random landscape, textile print, animated gif etc that happens to feature some colors I find pleasing together that I will file away to use as a jumping off point for something.

For example the color scheme in this painting comes from a sticker gif a brain on instagram. I don’t know if this is an embarrassing process but it’s apparently my process.

In other news I now have almost all of my proofs, foil and regular (Cancer and Taurus are on their way to me) up through Libra and I’ll probably start taking custom proof commissions soon. I did my first test one as a gift for my friend Alice just to get a feel for what it will be like to paint on these and I think it’s going to be a very fun for me to do these tiny pieces. In addition to the single cards I plan on offering a sun, moon, rising set which I should have a sample of soon, but obviously you could do any combination, grouped by elements etc.

And just a random recommendation from someone whose day job and art practice involve sitting very still and intently working for long stretches of time but the Morbid Anatomy patreon gives you access to almost 200 recorded lectures on a variety of historical and esoteric topics. I listened to the newest one about bog bodies while I designed the Libra logo yesterday and learned about this excellent Seamus Heaney poem I hadn’t heard before.

Ninth MtG card Virgo/Island

Writing these entries has made this stupid year seem like it’s going by suspiciously fast but here we are at Virgo and the 9th card is out! Again I’d remind people that the signs are mapped to the cards by qualities associated with the land type! For the Islands I also tried to play on the association of Islands with illusions by giving them all split horizons. The previous two revealed hidden things below the water while this one plays on the image doubled as a reflection and I designed it with the idea of looking at it flipped either way. I sort of regret not submitting it the other way round with the reflection at the top.

I’ve never really resonated with the symbology of Virgo. Some lady? Why? Boring! But in doing this project I finally sat down to actually look up the mythology and found it to be one of the more interesting ones. The lady in question is Astraea, a cosmic star goddess of justice who was the last of the gods to leave earth, spending her time among mortals trying to adjudicate disputes and compel humans to act fairly. When she finally decided we were simply too lost she ascended into the sky becoming the stars that make up Virgo.

Astrea/Astrape Apulian red-figure loutrophorus via Theoi/Getty images

Ovid, Metamorphoses 1. 148 ff (trans. Melville) (Roman epic C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) (via Theoi) :
"Last [of the Ages of Men] came the Race of Iron (Proles Ferro). In that hard age of baser vein all evil straight broke out, and honour fled and truth and loyalty, replaced by fraud, deceit and treachery and violence and wicked greed for gain . . . Honour and love lay vanquished, Astraea, virgin divine, the last of the immortals, fled away."

There is also an idea that one day she might return and bring about a new utopian age. This is a real myth type to me; Christian myths about the return of Jesus are an obvious point of reference but it’s something you find in a lot of utopian religious movements, including ufo cults like the Unarians and various ancient alien theories like those of Sitchin or Von Daniken, and the association of Astraea with specifically stars and space kind of pushed that to the forefront of my mind. It’s understandable (but probably not constructive) to want to believe that something more powerful than us exists, set this world in motion for some plausible reason, and will one day return with one weird trick to fix the big fucking mess we made. I tried to relay this cycle in making an image where, utilizing the reflected double, the star ascends and descends (and the image reverses).

Because of the position of this sign in the year it’s also often associated with harvest (Astraea is also pictured holding a sheaf of wheat) and the myth of Persephone/Demeter which is also a cyclical myth of descent and ascent, loss and hope, as Persephone descends into Hades towards the end of the year to serve her term as the goddess of the underworld, only to ascend in the Spring bringing new life with her.

Something interesting, that someone who understands the way astrology was formalized may know more about, is the fact that Astraea is associated with both Virgo and Libra, the more transparently justice themed sign immediately succeeding it. The qualities associated with Virgo of meticulousness and order map onto the idea of a goddess who brought calm and order as well. Maya was the one who came up with the idea of a tiny hidden temple on the island, remote and unreachable.

Only 3 more cards to go! I recently got some more proofs so I now have Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, and Aries, and I have several more on the way. I’ll probably start taking proof comissions once the next batch arrives just so people have a lot of options if they’re interested, and Donny will be managing those commissions as well. When they’re available he and I will both post about it. In the meantime I have an album cover underway and still have to finish my Gogol reprint which I’m hoping to have done by the end of October at least.

Eighth MtG card Leo/Plains

This months MtG Astrolands card has been released and like it’s companion last month, it’s Plains!

As I think I mentioned in last months blog, Maya’s insight about Leo and Cancer as sort of inverse companions (Moon/Water-Sun/Fire) gave me the idea to design them together so that they related to each other. For Leo I inverted the cool/warm color scheme, the direction of the element’s representation on the card (the river/the fiery ravine) and the location of the moon/sun. Here’s how they look overlayed:

The general concept for this came to me kind of intuitively. I wanted to do some plains that were not so much grassy fields and thought of the volcanic lava expanses you find in places like Iceland. Similar to how the image of the giant crabs from the time machine just came to me very clearly, I had the idea of a statue of some deity that also made a portal into the earth. In some of my earliest (very unclear) sketches the statue was going to be a more straightforward lion, but I decided it would be more fun (for me, personally) to make it sphinx, which has many lion features but is a kind of chimera. Sphinx and sphinx-like creatures are found in many of the mythologies and belief systems of the civilizations that built the foundations of astrology, and I modeled a lot of the design elements for this one off a variety of depictions of lions and dieties and creatures with lion aspects from the Mesopotamian region.

Human-headed winged lion found at Nimrud-Assyrian

Terra Cotta lion from Tell Harmal, Iraq Musem- Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin via Wikimedia Commons

Lion shaped bronze weight found in the Palace of Darius in Susa- Achaemenid Empire

Weirdly, and outside of any conscious intention on my part, in the novel the time machine the Traveller’s machine is being concealed underneath of a giant sphinx-like statue making a thread between the inspiration for the Cancer card and this one. I find myself stumbling into synchronicities like this all the time, and just thought that was a neat aside.

Like I think I mentioned from the start part of the design brief for all of these was to reference the psychedelia of 60’s/70’s astrology and new age art. This is probably the one that comes closest to tapping into that overtly mostly because of the way the stylized sun rays came out. Of course this is all dependent on where you live but the fact that this hot solar blasted Leo card came out during this horrible sunny heatwave where I am on the east coast feels appropriate.

In other news I have no real other news, still quietly finishing this painting series to reprint my zine by fall, almost finished with that. I sent this piece which is a few years old but has never been shown (or used for anything at all really) to NecronomiCon providence to be part of the Ars Necronomica show affiliated with the convention this summer. The show will be on view August 11-28 in Providence RI.

Seventh MtG card Cancer/Plains

I know everyone thought Cancer was going to be an island, but actually it’s the first plains card! If you hadn’t gathered by now, the way the signs are mapped to land types has less to do with a literal consideration (where do crabs live zzzz boring) and more to do with qualities associated with the signs and with the land types. This is actually more fun for me because it presents interesting challenges to work out and makes for less expected final images. I can see a lot of angry reactions online and all I can say about that is that I think you’ll generally have a bit more fun with fantasy if you stop expecting it to be practical and realistic all the time (it’s in the name!).

Given the prompt Cancer/Plains I had an immediate thought and image come to me, and its mostly inspired by my long running fascination with the part of H.G. Wells The Time Machine when the Traveller jumps so far into the future he finds only giant crab creatures roaming a dying earth chasing huge moths. This is an interesting choice on Wells part with some understanding of the process of Carcinisation (evolution constantly making and trying to make crabs). There’s a basic line drawing from my illustrated classic version of the Time Machine that as an adult isn’t very striking but as a kid absolutely fascinated me, I think more for the idea it evoked than anything else.

Illustration by Brendan Lynch for Moby Books edition of the Time Machine

The other image I had in mind was N.C. Wyeth’s the Giant (interesting article here about him doing this painting based on a concept an artist friend left behind when he passed away inspired by his own childhood nostalgia). I remembered my buddy Ellie telling me that she regarded the white cards in MtG as being not just related to the healing positive aspects of divinity but also the fearsome ones, so I liked the idea of doing the crab as an awe-inspiring looming mirage on the plain.

When I went to Maya for our consultation right off the bat I said “I don’t know why, I don’t know if this makes any sense but I just have this image stuck in my head for this and it’s based off the Time Machine and this Wyeth painting that made an impression on me as a kid” and their response was immediately that this was a Cancerian instinct so I should follow it. They also gave me a lot of good insight about the connection between Cancer and Leo as complimentary back to back signs (Moon/Sun, Water/Fire) but since I can’t show you Leo yet all I can say for now is that they were designed as compliments, and weirdly both came from a more intuitive place concept wise. They might be my favorite ones in the whole series.

Just because this is where I put long form thoughts now I wanted to write a little something about my friend Marcelo Gallegos who passed away a little over a week ago. We met years ago tabling at NecronomiCon when Mike and I ran around the hotel finding little end tables to attach to our merch table until we occupied a whole corner of the vending area and sat at times ten people deep chatting and joking and trading art. Marcello was so funny, and so sweet and so talented, one of the rare types of people I can feel an immediate freak bond with. I was lucky enough to get to have some really nice days with him when he lived in Philly briefly, poking around flea markets and eating good food, and had hoped to reunite again soon. I feel extremely devastated to lose such a lovely friend, and from the outpouring I can see from his friends in New Mexico and all over the world he was very loved by a lot of people. It would make me happy to know that more people saw his work and a little of who he was so I just wanted to take a minute to share a little. We love you Marcelo.

“The Looking Glass” by Marcelo Gallegos

In other assorted news Maya’s band the Ire has a new album out and I really recommend you listen to it and buy it because it’s great.

Please please please give your money to abortion funds (not PP and definitely not politicians who don’t care if we live or die).

I’m continuing work on my updated Gogol zine and have almost 4 new paintings finished with 2 more to go and will probably do a write up on that project soon too. Wear a mask to protect yourself and others! Watch Phil Tippet’s Mad God!! You can bid on the original painting for Cancer/Plains here! If you need me I will be floating in a lake in the Pine Barrens, dreaming of the day “America” will be nothing more than a micro millimeter of compressed plastics in the Earth’s vast geological record.

Sixth MtG card Gemini/Mountain

My 6th MtG land card was released at the end of last week and it’s Gemini/Mountain! This is a high pressure sign for me, because many of my favorite people are Geminis. There’s something about certain assignments where your mind gets stuck on one track for a very long time, and this is one of those. Twin/mountain just kept taking me to two mountain peaks and stopping there. It was sort of too literal and obvious to get my mind off that path for a while.

This is a sign I’ve always found a little puzzling because the icon/mythology is the twins (often associated with Castor and Pollux but also the Vedic Ashvins) but the characteristics usually have to do with changeability and dichotomy, so they are clearly not meant to be taken as identical or interchangeable. I was talking to my #1 Gemini Roxy and she pointed out that maybe this is because while Castor and Pollux are twins, they do have different fathers and as a result one is mortal and one is immortal. Maya’s guidance was about representing the twins as the same but legibly different, two sides of the same form, and my mind went to something more along the lines of tragedy/comedy masks. This gave me something to play around with and led me to the temple faces on the peaks, since I particularly like making hellmouth type designs. Like I mentioned when I wrote about the Aquarius/Island card this is an air sign and all the air signs have similar skies, since it’s the hardest element to represent in some tangible way. The temples are also meant to be positioned in the way that the twins heads are when looking at the constellation at certain angles.

This ended up being one of my favorite cards when it was finished, and it’s a part of a streak of illustrations I’m really proud of, so I’m excited for the next couple to come out. I still haven’t put the prints of this one or Taurus on INPRNT yet (oops) because I’m going to resize all the prints I have up. I saw the print a friend got irl and inprnt adds such a large additional border that the image becomes quite small. So the good news is once I fix this if you order the smaller size it will probably be about as big as the “large” size was before. I still have my own bigcartel with prints and zines btw! Also you can book a reading with Maya! If you want to see the new stuff I’m working on follow me on instagram, I have a few new paintings in progress right now. This is not my most interesting entry but honestly, it is very hot out right now and I can’t think.

Fifth MtG card Taurus/Forest

It’s a bit late in the season but the Taurus card was released on Tuesday and it’s the first of the forest cards I did! Something you’ll notice is that each landtype has a certain scale. The swamps and forests and very zoomed in, the mountains are at some distance, islands are very zoomed out and the plains are yet to be revealed. So this has some similarities to the layout of the first swamp card, but I was interested in doing this as an opening in or out of the forest. Taurus is an earth sign ruled by Venus located in a very seasonally transitional point in the year in my region of the world, also marking the point between the spring equinox and summer solstice.

Taurus is one of the oldest signs, associated by Mesopotamians with the Bull of Heaven defeated and thrown up into the sky by Enkidu, and then later associated with a number of other sacred bulls in other cosmologies . Something that particularly stuck out to me was the fact that the sun used to rise through the constellation taurus during the vernal equinox but no longer does due to the gradual wobble of the earth on it’s axis, The idea of the sun rising between the horns is evocative and seemed appropriate for a sign marking a transition period.

Neo-Assyrian cylinder seal dated 883-612 B.C. though to depict Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaying the Bull of Heaven

While I don’t think they’re generally thought to be connected this imagery of the sun in the horns in my mind is also strongly associated with Hathor and Isis both commonly depicted with a headdress of horns with a solar disc positioned between them.

Film still from Kenneth Anger’s 1972 film Lucifer rising featuring Myriam Gibril as Isis

For most of these because I was trying to abstract away from visually literal representations the horns framing the rising sun here are just a crumbling stone arch creating a doubled opening in the clearing of the trees.

I want to take a minute here to talk about an artist I discovered while doing my research for this project, because by some coincidence he did an entire cycle of zodiac landscapes. Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911) was a Lithuanian symbolist painter who created an incredible body of work (musical compositions, paintings, poems and stories) despite dying at just 35.

I really can’t recommend his work enough, and I’m so glad I found out about him through working on this. I found him when I was already well into this project and was surprised to find interesting similarities between our interpretations like in the case of his Taurus piece and I’ll be talking about him more in the future with some of the other cards. I also came across a term for an artistic method he used in his work while reading an essay about him that puts into words something I attempted with a few of these card designs (including this one): “Animisation, a popular principle of Symbolism, in which natural forms, such as a mountain, a bell, a cloud, the tops of the trees, are painted so as to be reminiscent of human or animal forms”. Strangely enough some of his landscape associations with the signs even map onto the MtG land type alignments Maya chose for each.

Insight from Maya about the characteristics associated with Taurus included it’s generative qualities, association with fertilization and food (hence the fruit trees). Consequently the vibe I was going for in color and light was lush, calm, warm and decadent. You look out a portal as light passes in.

Anyway little roundup, I’ll update the inprnt shop with this months print shortly, Maya’s May books are open if you want to schedule a session, If you want to bid on the original painting you can find the auction here and today and everyday and for so many reasons fuck the government, FUND ABORTIONS.

Fourth MtG card Aries/Mountain

Slightly late drop but it’s here! Aries is mountain, and what’s more appropriate for a fiery fire sign than a volcano? Talking to Maya during the conceptualization stage they explained something rather simple that had eluded me for a very long time about the signs mapped to a year and transitioning between each other. They laid out the idea of the fire sign as a generative spark in a sequence, and Aries as the first fire sign in the new year. For people living in the climate I do this is more or less the time of year we see the first signs of plants returning, seeds sprouting and sending up shoots, pollinators starting to wiggle out from under dead leaves so I connected with this and I liked the idea of a big fiery explosive beginning to be followed by fertile soil and new life.

The color associated with Aries is red, as is the case with MtG Mountain land types, which are also associated with action, impulse, passion and speed, all perfect for something as eruptive as a volcano. For this sign I wanted to just reference the symbol for aries in the lava form, a simplified version of the horns of a ram (sometimes identified as Chrysomallus the flying ram that provided the golden fleece). I also referred to my own work yet again, since I was instructed to pull from my previous series of paintings from my Endless Sky zine, though the requirements in terms of scale and color for the MtG seriesdidn’t leave much to draw from since the original is more realistic.

I’ve said a couple times my brain is just a big simmering stew or slurry I pluck ideas out of, and something that was burbling around in there for a long time was something my long time art penpal Tremor (you should commission him!!) mentioned offhand to me years ago (which neither of us totally remember) about a temple on the side of a volcano. In my mind I imagined a temple surviving countless eruptions, with the lava just diverting around it, and I was just waiting for the right thing to apply it to.

I was also working on this while Mt. Etna was having a lot of activity. I recommend this instagram account to any other lava freaks. I also read Basin and Ridge by John McPhee last year and have been marveling over geological/deep time, the wild reforming of the planet through eruptions, plate movements, massive shifts and upheavals. I find it all weirdly soothing.

Other things of potential interest: I opened an Inprnt account for all of the MtG prints, with a special border, because I wanted them to be a bit more embellished. The border was inspired by a very specific era of fantasy borders you sometimes saw on cards or paperbacks. I normally am not super into print to order sites and prefer to give my money to local printers, but this series has too many unique pieces (12!) for the to ultimately be able to preprint them all and guess at interest and manage sales .

I’m not opposed to throwing up other pieces on there if someone is after a print of something I have no plans for at the moment so feel free to email me at wanderinggenieart@gmail.com if there’s something you’ve had your eyes on. I added this older Orphic Egg painting at someone’s request already so that’s also available!

I also did this interview with the #1 sweetie pie Skinner! He’s one of my favorite people and I always love chatting with him and we really do know how to ramble off topic. Did you know he’s working on an incredible epic psychedelic stop motion movie right now ?!?! He has a patreon where you can support his ambitious projects.

Also Maya, whose astrological insight was so crucial to me working on this series is opening bookings for readings right now, short half hour ones or longer more in-depth ones. Maya is really very insightful and thoughtful so if that’s something you’ve ever wanted to try out you can book here!

Oh and if you’re interested in bidding on the original it’s in a fb auction group here but you can also contact Donny who is running the auction! Ends Tuesday evening 4/5