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.

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.

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.

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.