Showing posts with label inferno. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inferno. Show all posts

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Picasso in Hell part 2

Last time I told you about why I painted Picasso in Hell. Today I will tell you about what's in it and why I put it there. But before I begin, let me reacquaint you with this excursion into the Inferno:

So, what the inferno is going on, Clark? Why does Picasso have freakishly large hands?! Look around the Googles at pictures of Picasso and notice how prominently his hands feature in a lot of those pictures. I thought this was appropriate seeing as how he made his living working with those hands. He was a manual laborer. He also smoked a lot. I know that wasn't really all that unusual, but still, I thought it would be fun to put a couple of cigarettes in there as a kind of testament to the excesses that landed him in hell in the first place.

Picasso of the large, nicotine stained hands.
The minotaurs are probably next on the list of things to talk about. As monsters, they are a travesty. In the Greek understanding of life, the universe and everything (and also partly in the Christian one), Man is the crowning glory of creation and the crown of Man is his head, or his reason. So to take a man and crown him with the head of a bull takes away his reason and lowers him to the state of an animal that is governed by his passions and appetites. Picasso once said “If you marked on a map all the routes along which I passed and drew a line to join them together, it would perhaps take the shape of a Minotaur.” This is fitting for a guy with a biography like his; one that is strewn with broken women and illegitimate children. 

The minotaur stowaway.
The bike seat in the boat was just for fun. It's a take on Picasso's famous bicycle/handlebars bull's head from 1942. But it's hell and you're not allowed to keep the cool stuff you've made. So there's a weird warthog sneaking in to filch it.
The bike thief caught in the act.
There are other things, of course, and you may even be wondering about them. Why is there a bug-winged dinosaur or a gas-masked... thing... in the sky? Who are the blue people? What's that giant killer whale doing in there? I'm glad you asked all of these things. In fact, I hope that you ask a lot more questions than that. Pictures are not books, they famously show they do not tell. So I think I have given enough decoder key type clues to this picture to satisfy the mildly curious. Keep looking and enjoy to spectacle.

(PS Think Hieronymus Bosch for the monsters in the sky!)

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Jormungandr

In Norse myth, Jormungandr is also known as the Midgaard Serpent or The World Serpent. The Greeks called it Orobouros. It is a monstrous serpent that circles the world; it is so large that it is able to stretch around the earth and still fit its tail in its mouth. This fitting of the tail into the mouth is telling because it speaks of cycles, repetition. 

This drawing is about many things. It's actually a pastiche of several different drawings that laid around in my studio for a long time before I knew what to do with them. The head was a demo for pen and ink and the gargoyle heads were for an illustration job of some sort. Jormungandr came later. I put all of this together because of my reading of Purgatorio in The Divine Comedy and CS Lewis' The Discarded Image. For the medievals, chance, fortune, mutability, change, sin, all of these things were alien to the heavens properly speaking. All that stuff only happened below the circle of the moon. (Did you see the moon in my drawing? Did you? Did you?) The title of my piece is Subjected to Futility and Beset with Temptations. Because we live below the circle of the moon, we are subject to things like temptations - we repeat cycles of temptation, self-denial, temptation, capitulation, repentance, temptation, self-denial, etc.


The Divine Comedy itself is, of course, based on circles, a spiral, and spheres. (My chart of Paradiso can be seen here.) In hell everyone is confined to a circle which is a never-ending cycle. Once in a circle, no one in it can ever leave it. In a sense, in hell, the serpent bites his tail and never lets it go. This is my diagram of hell and its circles:


This is a two page spread from my drawing book Sins Committed, Sins Remitted. There is an orange Jormungandr and a blue Ouroboros. My Ouroboros is crying for reasons that I will leave up to you, the viewer. (The red earthworm astronaut should maybe be ignored - or not, it's up to you.) I like the medieval artists' tendency to draw all of their animals with little ears and a dog nose. And plus drawing mammalian dragons is pretty fun. 


To sum up, Jormungandr and Ouroboros are cyclical monsters that devour themselves and they figure into my artwork somehow. I don't know how much more I have to write about them as I still find them both mysterious. I will just have to keep making drawings to figure it all out.



Monday, September 15, 2014

Picasso in Hell part 1


I am a big fan of the Divine Comedy by Dante. I won't write much about it here since that would be like trying to describe the Brothers Karamazov using only pictures from Awkward Family Photos. But please allow me to say a little bit. Dante populates his Inferno with a lot of people; some of them he knew by reputation and some of them he knew personally.

I started to wonder who he would put in hell if he was writing today. This may be a pointless exercise; I'm not sure. But I don't mean it out of any malice, so I don't think there is any harm. Looking back on recent art history (Dante has several artists in Purgatory on their way up to Paradise) I thought about Picasso as a colossal figure whose ego would demand that he be mentioned in a work like The Comedy. Knowing some of Picasso's biography, I think it is safe to assume Dante would have assigned him to hell.

While he would probably have landed in the circle of the lustful and their blowing winds, I put him down with the wrathful. Not because he was a particularly angry guy (I guess), but because I used Eugene Delacroix's Barque of Dante as my model.

I began this piece as a watercolor but soon became dissatisfied with the bland colors and flatness of the piece. I liked the drawing aspect of it and wanted to rescue that from mediocre painting.


I painted over the whole thing with oils. I didn't really add anything except the flaming city of Dis in the background. I switched up some colors and juiced everything for the electrifying spectacle seen below. 


There's a lot going on here and I will talk about the content of this picture next time in part 2 of Picasso in Hell.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

The Comedy



This illustration was a pain in the neck, but I am so glad I did it. I love the Comedy (all three of the books) and I was thrilled to get the opportunity to map out Inferno. The chart for Paradiso is a little outside of the norm for me, but I enjoyed making it as well.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Wasps


Ink on paper. This was an illustration for the Inferno. The souls that were neutral in life don't even get to go to hell. They have to wait in the anteroom to hell where they are tormented by wasps and maggots.