31
Jul
Above: "Summer Faery, Winter Night"
July 2010
Watercolor on Bristol
9” x 12”
Living in the Great White North as I do, I often wonder what happens to all the little creatures during the dead of winter.. In the spring, life explodes forth. Migratory birds return, plants send green shoots to break through soil, but there are those tenacious creatures that whether out the winter’s harshest cold. Snails seal themselves in their shells, frogs burrow into muddy refuges, fish sink deep into the bottom of waterways, all patiently waiting… But what happens to faeries? Do they live on what they can scavenge, like the raccoons and deer, or do they enter a torpor like the insects?
Our family has an ancient Solstice Night ritual, brought from the old country, where at the precise hour of midnight, we place bayberry candles out to renew our gratitude to the friendly faeries for their help and protection through the year. Standing in the moonlight, holding hands together by the glow of the little candles, freezing cold and with snow up to the my boots, I wondered what happens to the faeries during these cold winter nights.
This was how I imagined one might look… tattered but still fierce, wings ripped but blade still at the ready, snow falling behind (she must have found some shelter), her colors still bright, even as the world has gone dark: she is determination in the face of adversity.
The Pennsic Wars are an experience like none other. Roughly 14,000 people converge on a campground in the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania for two weeks and convert it into a medieval city, complete with a town square, a market, bazaar tents, street performers, shows, residential city blocks, and armored battles surrounding the town with a different challenge posed to the opposing armies every day. Participants are drawn primarily from the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) and the event is hosted by the SCA, but several smaller historical and fantasy groups find space to play there, too.
Since I’m packing up to sell artwork out of The Magic Mirror (next to the Bath House) here’s a special piece created to commemorate some SCA history.
This is the SCA’s “Heraldic Family Tree,” re-creating a depiction of lineage in a style very consistent with what was used through the latter middle ages through the renaissance. In this case, the “family,” and representing arms correspond not to people, but to the SCA’s 19 kingdoms. We start with the West, East, and Middle, each incorporating one year apart from each other. From these, we see how they “branched” to form each new kingdom, and see the history.
A little artistic license was used in putting the West, the oldest kingdom, as the middle fork. This was done to create a more symmetrical tree, since the West was the most “prolific” of the kingdoms.
At the bottom we have the lady who started it all by holding a tournament and medieval-themed party in her back yard on May 1st 1966. Diana the Listmaker, midwife to the SCA: 45 years later, the party hasn’t stopped yet!
24
Jul
The Magpie
It’s July, and around here, that means humidity somewhere around the tropical conditions that make most jungle reptiles happy. However, it also means that if you’re an illustrator whose favorite medium is watercolor on paper, things get interesting. In hopes of getting as many new pieces as I can ready for Pennsic, I work as much as I can on one piece, hang to dry with a fan on it, move to another piece, repeat, repeat, repeat.
After allowing this piece to dry OVERNIGHT, it was solid enough to scan and upload this morning. One down, *cough* to go… Ladies and Gentlemen, Children of all Ages, in all her radiant beauty, I present, “The Magpie.”
13
Jul
the "Controversial Cover" so that you can make up upur own mind.
I’m realizing that, no matter what I do, it’s going to be controversial to somebody, I’m just wired that way, and I’m just going to have to accept it as a part of my own self-awareness. Call it ‘artistic temperament,’ call it “badly socialized…’ .
After introducing myself to somebody last weekend, they knew the name and said, “Oh! The painter of the controversial Pennsic cover!” (pictured above)
Unaware it was controversial, I put on my best Tristan Alexander and said, “The figure was fully covered, neck to wrists, dress not only to the floor but pooling with yards of fabric. I couldn’t have made her more covered if I’d tried!”
…but I suppose that, since I painted the drapery in an authentic, renaissance fashion, often called “Wet Drapery” by art scholars and people with doctorates in art history and all those professors who made you suffer through “Art in the Dark” (aka Art 101) it’s controversial.
I suppose some fish just evolved to swim in choppy waters or swim against the current. Certain species of plants thrive in harsh environments. My closest friends and I have always thought of ourselves as something of a modern-day Rom “Campagnia,” without being of the Blood. Bohemians, outsiders, libertines, maladepts, and commie-pinko-faggots, all of us. Since my internal moral compass appears to be broken, and I’m not likely to get the art to be what they feel is appropriate, I paint for myself, and I’ll let them tell me what’s controversial after I’m done painting it.
“There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.”
-Brendan Behan, Irish author and dramatist (1923-1964)
“It is better to be looked over than overlooked.”
-Mae West, American Actress and sex symbol (1892-1980)
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
-Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005)
This man was not only one of my idols, he was one of the biggest reasons I chose to go into illustration. I wanted to draw and paint just like he did. I still do, except that I’ve been around the drawing table enough to have learned that I’ll never create worlds just like his, but I still aspire for my illustrations to have the richness and quality his always did. He was a beacon that lit the fires of imagination for me and countless others. I stand on the shoulders of giants.
Frank Frazetta Dies – Comics Illustrator Was 82 – Biography – NYTimes.com
Another SCA cover, but one where I got to incorporate some fantasy elements to bring a little of “the Dream” into “the Reality.” (I do love doing that!)
June 2010 AEstel Cover : Jousting
This was commissioned specifically as a tribute to the late Viscountess Rannveigr Haakonardottir, as an act of respect from the AEthelmearc equestrian community to one who was invaluable to them.
This lady was instrumental in making AEthelmeac’s equestrian program what it was. She passed from this world recently, of breast cancer, and all too soon for many folks liking. she’s one of those souls who seems to have brightened nearly every life she touched,which may be one of the reasons why she was able to become such a patroness of the equestrian arts within AEthelmearc and see them become something much greater than their meager beginnings.
She is deeply missed by many of the lives she brightened, but, as the folk wisdom teaches, one is not truly gone until the last person living forgets their stories…. So, we have a jouster, galloping the “long and winding road” that is and was AEthelmearc Equestrian.
Above: May 2010 TALON Cover: DaVinci Quote
Watercolor on paper with digital typesetting.
The May 2010 TALON cover, posted for your enjoyment. For the interested, the quote is a Leonardo DaVinci where he lets loose with a deliciously scathing indictment on “sheeple,” (ie; the people who never think beyond the capacity of herd animals, such as sheep). There’s something marvelous about knowing they were just as irritating in his day as they are in mine, so it was just too good for me to pass up.
‘”And those men who are inventors and interpreters between Nature and man, as compared with boasters and declaimers of the works of others, must be regarded and not otherwise esteemed than as the object in front of a mirror, when compared with its image seen in the mirror. For the first is something in itself, and the other in nothingness — Folks little indebted to nature, since it is only by chance that they wear the human form and without it I might class them with the herd of beasts.” –Leonardo da Vinci
The Prayer Book of Claude de France
The Prayer Book of Claude de France is a tiny, jewel-like manuscript that was made for Claude (1499–1524) around 1517, the year she was crowned queen of France. Her coat of arms appears on three different folios. The book is richly illustrated: the borders of each leaf are painted, front and back, with 132 scenes from the lives of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and numerous saints. The manuscript and a companion Book of Hours also made for the queen (in a Paris private collection) were illuminated by an artist who was given the nickname Master of Claude de France after these two volumes. Active in the French city of Tours during the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the artist worked in a style that can be characterized as the pinnacle of elegance. The colors of his delicate palette are applied in tiny, seemingly invisible brushstrokes. Only about a dozen manuscripts painted by the artist survive.
In 1514, at age fourteen, Claude de France was married to François d’Angoulême (1494–1547), who became King François I in 1515. The marriage was political: Claude was duchess of Brittany, a duchy the king wanted to keep under his control. Short and hunched, Claude still managed to provide seven children (her second son became King Henry II) in ten years of marriage before dying of exhaustion at age twenty-four.
Also viewable on this Web site is the Prayer Book of Anne de Bretagne. Anne (1477–1514) was Claude’s mother. She was queen of France twice, first as the wife of King Charles VIII and then as the wife of King Louis XII, who was Claude’s father. Anne commissioned her book around 1495 for her son the dauphin, Charles-Orland (who died of smallpox shortly thereafter). Anne’s manuscript was illuminated by Jean Poyer, a leading Tours illuminator in whose workshop the Claude Master is thought to have trained. These two codices thus juxtapose a mother’s book with her daughter’s and the work of one illuminator with that of his protégé.
The Prayer Book of Claude de France (MS M.1166) is the gift of Mrs. Alexandre P. Rosenberg in memory of her.
(Reprinted here for educational purposes only. Thanks to Tristan Alexander for the Lead!)
We live, we grow, and perspective shifts. It’s necessary. Mike Tyson said, “If you’re the same person now that you were fifteen years ago, you’ve just wasted fifteen years.” I use this quote a lot, but there are some areas where it’s just necessary to maintain integrity. Even if an acorn has the potentiality to become an oak tree, it still needs to start as a little nut that held its ground.
This past Saturday was Ice Dragon. The members of the SCA in the northeast of the United States, as well as the southern parts of Ontario and Quebec, may recognize its reputation as one of the more prestigious competitions for medieval and renaissance art re-creation in the area. Many will claim it is the single most prestigious, and the single highest-pressured skull-crusher of a competition in the northeast as well. Taking the Ice Dragon Pentathlon, or “the Pent” is a great honor that means the winner entered at least five different categories and still came away with the highest combined score: no small feat!
This was my first year judging, and what a brain shift it was: me, “l’enfant terrible,” suddenly on the “respectable” side, one of the judges on the inside instead of the gadfly on the outside!
Reading the rubrics was the single biggest perspective shift. Now I understood! This is what they were looking for, and why! What they’re looking for is no closely guarded secret: Quality means documentation (Remember that picky high-school English teacher that made you cite your sources? Same thing.), authenticity (period materials, authentic process, etc.), complexity, creativity, workmanship, and aesthetics, with a score of 1-10 for each. A perfect score would be 60.
Not much trouble, but I came to a bit of a snag with the period materials. You see, I’m judging painting, but at home I have a lovely little white kitty who thinks purple is tasty. This is why I personally made the choice to switch to entirely non-toxic modern equivalents. I know how to handle period paint, but my kitty does not.
Is this fair? After all, the person who has chosen to sacrifice all in the name of Renaissance Painting and the SCA, has no pets, no children, and intellectually-challenged friends (one of mine drank my bottle of Windex), lives in a concrete bunker and simply goes to work, comes home, and does nothing but 100% authentic painting… shouldn’t they get higher points, in this case? Yet, if we’ve set this as the standard, are we not sending a loud and clear message, “If you really want to wear the wreath of laurels upon your head, you must be willing to do it at the cost of the lives of your children, pets, and thick-headed friends?”
I feel a strange connection to this category, since, in a way, I feel like I “created it,” (or maybe it was created for me.) Back in 1996, I showed up with a self-portrait in oils, but the judges had no idea what to do with me or it, so we were sent to “miscellaneous.” When I showed up the next year with an oil copy of Caravaggio’s St. Catherine, meant to simulate Florentine renaissance methods of learning to paint like the old masters (ie: copying existing pieces), they had a category waiting for me; “Graphic Arts.” The following year, I took my category with a preparatory sketch from life rendered in lamp black. This year, I judged it.
Yet, still l’enfante terrible, I simply could not bring myself to take off a single, solitary point for the use of non-toxic modern equivalents to period materials, provided they could explain what would have been used. The best example I saw read something like: “I used (these) colors. They are cited in (this) book (author, page), and these colors are cited in this book (author, page), so we know they used them during the (time period) in (place). They were made into paint by (method)… (ex: Davy’s gray is a greenish-gray made from powdered slate, iron oxide and carbon black. It’s also called steel gray or gunmetal, if you’re an interior decorator.) I chose to… (insert your method here).”
Painting, drawing, and studio arts automatically grade on a very steep curve. After all, in this strange little world, we truly do stand on the shoulders of giants. With examples such as DaVinci, Holbein, Raphael, Michaelangelo, and more as our “period exemplars,” we are graded much more strictly on craftsmanship, technique, and aesthetics. The minute we insist, or even imply, that toxic materials will lead to “The Bays,” (an old term for Laurel Leaves), the responsibility will fall squarely on us for encouraging irresponsible behavior. Can some painters handle their materials responsibly? Of course they can, just as some will bullocks it up completely, some will insist on living in bunkers, and others will have cats, or children, who will be tempted to see what that pretty shade of verdigris tastes like.
Striving for excellence is a marvelous. It’s one of the best reasons I can think of to bother getting out of bed in the morning. Michaelangelo understood it when he wrote, “Blame the mistress that I serve.” However, that mistress can be a wily little thing, and when she turns on my family, that’s when I firmly stand my ground. No laurel wreath, no matter how pretty, is worth the life of an innocent. Ever.
Currently, I’m bustin’ my tail to make sure the medical illustration project is finished “on time + under budget” (end of the month) while still meeting my own quality standards. There’s 10 pieces total, focusing on the temporomandibular joint (TMJ). Three are done so far, but I’m expecting re-works to the text. (Medical aways does.) I’ll post them to the medical illustration gallery as I finish them!
TMJ Enlarged to Show Detail.