Woven — Jeanne D'Angelo

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.