Third MtG card Pisces/Island etc

Surprise! It’s another Island haha. When Maya made the alignments for these it was based on the characteristics and qualities of the land types and the signs and where they overlapped, and we really didn’t know that they’d be slow rolled out so apologies for the same land type twice in a row. I know island seems obvious for the sign whose iconography is all fish based, but trust I would have found a way to paint a fish flopping up a mountain if that was the assignment.

Island is actually a perfect fit in my mind beyond the very obvious and practical though. Maya and I talked about Pisces as the legendarily moody and mysterious sign, and the association in both mythology and various spiritualities and also Jungian psychoanalysis of the ocean depths with the subconscious/dreams/imagination. Fitting for a sign associated with introspection. Again I wanted to play with the way “illusion” is linked to the Island land type in MtG. I almost immediately thought of the folkloric islands that appear to weary and lost sailors to be dry land to rest on but turn out to be the backs of giant fish, whales and turtles which suddenly dive carrying the unwary down into the depths. Thinking you are in a stable and solid place and suddenly finding yourself submerged into something less tangible and knowable also seemed fitting for pisces.

This first time I remember encountering this was in the First Voyage of Sinbad from Arabian Nights:

“But while we were enjoying ourselves from the fatigue of the sea, the island on a sudden trembled, and shook us terribly. The trembling of the island was perceived on board the ship, and we were called upon to re-embark speedily, or we should all be lost; for what we took for an island proved to be the back of sea monster. The nimblest got into the sloop, others betook themselves to swimming; but for myself I was still upon the back of the creature, when he dived into the sea, and I had time only to catch hold of a piece of wood that we had brought out of the ship to make a fire.“

The fish are modeled after koi and their arrangement is meant to mimic the two curved lines in the symbol for Pisces, though traditionally the fish imagery tends to be more of an interlocked head to tail 69ing orientation. I was also kind of amused thinking about how two fish pulling opposite directions wouldn’t travel anywhere, resulting in a still island. Since one of the most emphasized bits of direction I was given was to make the palette as bright and neon as possible I had to try and capture some sort of moody somberness just with the juxtaposition of bright and warm colors with cool and deep ones.

I’ll be working on getting a print to order webstore up for prints of this series this month. In the meantime, I reopened my Big Cartel. In it you can buy three of my art zines, one of which is Endless Sky which contains the whole series of studies MtG asked me to draw from for the cards, as well as some really nice Riso Prints my friends at PaperPressPunch printed. I’m also going to be working on some new illustrations to add to a reprint of my long out of print Gogol Zine, which will include a new fancy cover I’m very excited about. That will ideally come out in late spring/early summer

Second MtG card Aquarius/Island and other stuff.

Well the second MtG card dropped and caught me off guard two weeks ago, though I shouldn’t have been surprised because it was the first day of Aquarius season which is MY sign and season hah. First off, yeah it’s an island, I suppose it’s the obvious choice for what seems like the wettest watery sign except GASP Aquarius despite the name, the associated symbols and myths, is an AIR sign.

For most of these how to reference the sign elements visually was obvious. If it’s earth and you incorporate trees, plants, minerals you get the picture. If it’s a water sign make sure there’s some water, fire, also easy. But air is harder to depict in still images, and what I landed on is this sky element which has a lot of implied movement to it. Like I said previously part of my brief had been to draw as much as possible from my previous sky series, so I plucked the sky technique fom this piece as I also felt it tapped into the 70’s psychedelia vibe I was also supposed to be evoking. You can expect the other air signs (Gemini and Libra) to incorporate this element as well.

The thing I found most interesting in the brief in regards to land types was the association of Islands with “illusion” so another consistent element with the islands will be this idea of the juxtaposition of the surface with what is invisible below it. Probably because this is my sign it’s the one I got the most pop psychology with, and I wanted to play on the stereotypical attribute of both being inscrutable on the surface yet plugged into big complex and expansive cosmic ideas. The vessel of Ganymede the water bearer is represented by the clay covered peak above the sea with water trickling down to join the larger body of water it’s connected to below.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated with the idea of hidden and sunken underwater cities. When I was a kid my grandfather would take me out in a rowboat and I would watch the ocean floor slowly become murky and disappear as we got further out and I would imagine little invisible worlds and fantasize about going to live there. I actually did an early painting based on Poe’s The City in the Sea a very long time ago, which was flawed in a few ways, but which I reworked in several ways here. Also I just like eels.

Also did you know that Maya wrote horoscopes to correspond with all of these? They all dropped at once and you can read them here!

In non MtG news, I was asked to put together a flyer for the Monthly Fund, a local music series, which has previously raised money for a group I’ve worked with for years Shut Down Berks as well as a ton of other Philadelphia organizers/groups who I think do great work. I was happy to oblige and snowed in last weekend so I knocked it out really quickly. The border is painted and the text and neon orange elements are collaged in digitally from some ink blob textures and hand drawn text I made. The idea is that at a later date I’ll be able to return to all the blank space I left in the original painting to complete it as a personal piece though I’m not quite sure what I want to do with that yet.

Everybody's into Weirdness Right Now

Now that the blog is set up I’m going to go back to work from last year which I couldn’t elaborate on much because of the confines of instagram. The first is a painting I finished in September. It was inspired by Valis by Philip K Dick, particularly a line about Eros being "Thanatos wearing a mask" (I assume he is playing with the Freudian understanding of these concepts here) . The split figure refers to the split personas of Horselover Fat (the protagonist of the book) and Phil (the stand in for PKD). The otherworldly color of the pink light (which Horselover understands as “Zebra”) that PKD/Horselover Fat saw in his moment of revelation is a constant throughout the story, something he thinks he sees glimmers of even later when existing on another layer of reality.

If you've never read this book or are generally unfamiliar with some of PKD's spiritual beliefs, on February 20, 1974 he had an experience involving a beam of pink light which entered his mind allowing him to be consciously aware that he was experiencing two timelines simultaneously, that of his life in modern California and as a part of a persecuted Christian underground movement in the ancient Roman empire, which never fell. He went on to develop a complex often paranoid Gnostic spirituality around his perception of these two simultaneous realities, and his belief that we are experiencing life as a series of simulations, which at his most optimistic he thought were being run by a god figure to rescue us from our world, which he saw as "the Black Iron Prison".

In a lot of ways Valis is a personal conversational narrative, where the protagonist who is himself an aspect of PKD puzzles through the meaning of his revelation and comes to understand it through several different shifting narrative lenses and realities including a science fiction/ sociopolitical one, and interacts with another aspect of himself in doing so. There’s a lot of doubt, paranoia and confusion, and because he was so invested in the topic and was so well read, a lot of references to the various pre-existing systems he was testing his own evolving understanding against, and you can find a lot of ideas from what would posthumously be compiled into his Exegisis throughout the text .

If you're interested in learning more about the ways PKD's fiction and philosophy intersected, his later belief that his fiction was not actually fiction etc, you can watch an entire recording of his speech to a baffled group of French fans titled "If you Find this World Bad you Should See Some of the Others" on youtube or read a transcript here here's also an episode of the Imaginary Worlds podcast titled "Visions of Philip K Dick" I recommend.

A couple of random intersections in the lattice of coincidence around the time I was designing this particular illustration:

While I was reading Valis in FDR park a man who was catching turtles in the lake approached me saying “oh you like reading? I wrote a book! I died three times and came back” and handing me his business card.

His website is no longer live but here is a description of his book from his publisher’s page:

“This information has been downloaded to my brain from God, the Angels, and my Spirit Guides. They want me to tell the world that everyone on the planet may be more worldly spiritual, together as one. They wish you to know the true meaning of God, our creator, his army of angels, and other spiritual beings in our galaxy and the universe!

No religion is better than another religion. There is one God, the creator for all of us on this planet. Your religion may visualize God, and what you think God looks like, but God is both male and female, and is an energy essence form of intelligence that can manifest to look like any creation. This is their message to mankind.

You must read this book over and over again until you actually get it. The majority of people will not understand it at first. You must eat and drink natural foods so the cells in your body will heal your DNA and, in turn, your universal spirituality will ignite through your pituitary gland, the master gland. You will see things that you have never seen before”

It felt in the moment like the book had leaked into the world around me; a genuinely 3D multi-sensory reading experience. If you read his bio on the publishers site you even find him slipping between first and third person like Horselover Fat/PKD does. I’ve seen him at the park a few times since, catching invasive red-eared sliders from the lake and giving them away to kids. It makes me happy to know that there’s a regular joe mystic in my neighborhood.

The second thing was a scene in the documentary Poly Styrene:I am a Cliche which I was fortunate to get to see in probably my last and only public gathering of the past 2 years, outside in the dog bowl at Clark Park. The movie is a really beautiful, thoughtful and unflinching portrayal of Poly Styrene (best known as the singer for the XRay Spex) who was probably one of my earliest artistic and intellectual influences and I highly recommend it. In it there’s a brief reference to an experience she had in the 70’s which left a deep impact on her (you can read a bit more context on it in this review) :

“WHILE TOURING the UK with X-Ray Spex in the late ’70s, vocalist Poly Styrene had a very close encounter with a UFO.

A luminous pink fireball of energy glided up to her hotel room window and gave Poly a message, which she dutifully reported the next morning to her band. “Everyone thought I’d lost the plot,” she told an interviewer. It was “the moment that changed me forever”, she said. Her life would follow an extraordinary, often deeply painful trajectory in the aftermath of that event.”

A Page from the Augsburg Book of Miracles. The translated caption reads “In the year A.D. 1300 a fearful comet appeared in the sky. And this year, on St. Andrew’s Day, the ground was shaken by an earthquake so that many buildings collapsed. “

Relaunching the blog/I designed Magic the Gathering cards!

At this point I have no idea how many people still follow me from my blogging days, but if any of you are still around, HI! I actually really miss writing about the things that inspire what I make and having a place to interact with people and get their thoughts and perspectives on it. Like pretty much everyone I see clearly the limits of the various social media feeds I’ve been pushed into using and want to get back to more direct and longform stuff even if it reaches fewer people and gets less (superficial) “reactions”. Also, and this is a major factor, I miss being able to provide LINKS because crediting and sharing other people/works I find interesting is hugely important to me, and it’s a struggle on all these other platforms that are designed to keep you confined entirely in their apps.

Part of my reason for coming back to it is the fact that I finished a big project with a lot of pieces I think would be fun to talk about, and that is the 12 paintings I did for the MtG Secret Lair Astrolands series. These are basic land cards mapped to the signs of the zodiac and I conceptualized and completed all the paintings in the first 3 months of 2021. They will be releasing one a month for the next twelve months in the order the signs appear.

I’ll start by saying that I never anticipated being reached out to for something like this. I love fantasy art but realize my style isn’t really what most people are after in the more mainstream fantasy world these days. The art director for this project Jessica Lanzillo reached out to me because she saw my Endless Skies series and felt it could be a good jumping off point for what they were after, which was a psychedelic and not necessarily literal or traditional take on astrological imagery. The direction was pretty open ended beyond that, and I had a lot of room to interpret .

Personally I’m more than willing to say I don’t know much about something and I’ll say I don’t know much about astrology. Or rather I don’t know much with any real depth to it. As someone who’s interested in the history of magical practice and mythology it crosses and intersects into a ton of my reading and of course I encounter it in the more popular sense disseminated in aesthetics and art, memes and offhand comments from friends who dabble. But in terms of the real deal practical craft I am clueless, and trying to jump in what I find is charts that are inscrutable to me as a novice.

I was really excited when Jess said they’d be willing to hire an astrologer for me to consult with and immediately knew I wanted to reach out to Maya Brooks, someone I’ve always enjoyed talking to about occult stuff, an insightful thinker on astrology AND a MtG nerd. Maya was ultimately responsible for arranging the alignments of signs to land types, and I think a lot of people will be surprised that some of them are a lot more creatively and thoughtfully chosen, not necessarily the more obvious or literal choices which actually made for some fun and cool challenges for me.

Coming up with concepts for me is usually a matter of gathering a thousand ideas and inspirations into a murky brain stew and then waiting for something to congeal into an image and while I’m sure a fraction of my thoughts going into the piece are legible from the outside I think it helps push me in less obvious directions. For this project there was a lot to balance. Keep the pallet as bright as humanly possible, draw from my previous work, the practical qualities of each kind of landscape, the associations of the land/mana types in MtG, classical zodiac mythology and imagery, the elements and planetary rulers of each sign and all of the deeper astrological concepts and insights Maya brought me for each one.

Here’s the first finished card, Capricorn! For this card Maya and I talked about the rulership of Saturn over Capricorn and I was most interested in playing off of the Roman concept of Dis Pater. This means "rich father" and is actually applied to Pluto/Hades, but in this case I thought it was relevant to Capricorn/Saturn as well because it's an earth sign, and the appellation refers to the connection of cthonic gods with wealth, both material mineral wealth and fecundity that comes from the underworld and the earth. There's a certain binary way of representing death, and the affiliation of death with swamps that's a bit limiting to me, because generally speaking in mythology and a lot of occult systems death is strongly connected to rebirth, and to change and harvest and this fits the with the rulership of Saturn, and the placement of Capricorn at what is the beginning of a new year in many traditions.

Additionally swamps are nutrient rich environments where rotting matter is constantly turning over into new life. I'm fascinated with chimera so a Sea Goat is a really interesting creature, made up of elements of both land and sea, which I felt could make an interesting bridge for an Earth sign that finds itself in the wet environment of the Swamp. I made it skeletal as a very basic reference to the association of Swamps with death in MtG and also because of all of the associations mentioned above, but I also designed a little insignia of a living one which I intend to offer as a template for customized proofs when I get them. (see above)

This is also a silly thing, but I look to a lot of random places for color scheme ideas, since I had to come up with 12 at once which were all bright, seemed to fit with each other but not be too similar to each other and my jumping off point for this one was Mad Marc Rude's cover for Earth A.D.

For all of these I wanted to create the most saturated pallet possible so I used very few drab neutrals and no black except in some limited ways mixed with color for linework and deep shadow. In most places for this series I actually used royal blue instead of black which I think gives a lot of the series a hazy dreamy quality I’m pretty into. Also worth noting for people that don’t play MtG, the lands all have mana colors associated with them and for swamp it’s black. I didn’t take the mana colors literally and instead went to the qualities associated with them, but it’s funny painting a “black” card with no black I suppose.

I’m really excited for some of the cards coming up, some of my favorite will be coming out this summer. So far it’s been a mixed bag to be on the receiving end of commentary from a huge fandom. Everyone contacting or commenting to me personally has been really kind and excited about the project, and I genuinely am excited to have contributed art to a game that means a lot to a ton of my friends! I’ll be selling my originals shortly and as they drop through a broker in a fb group so feel to contact me if you need that info. Eventually I’ll be getting sheets of artists proofs and will be able to make custom sketch cards available, though I hear the sheets have been pretty delayed due to covid so I’m not sure when that will be.

Also wanted to mention that Amy from Amazonian reached out to me to answer some questions about the art. Unfortunately, I was too busy to set up recording a chat with her this week (the card drop caught me off guard actually!) but I was able to answer some questions via text and she did a great job translating them into a short video you can watch here.

As always you can find me on instagram and reluctantly on twitter where my art posts can be found sandwiched between my harassment of hyperlocal politicians or email me with any questions at wanderinggenieart@gmail.com. Oh and check out the band Maya sings in, The Ire! One of my absolute favorite local bands without a doubt.