FINISHED!

These are photos of the drawing I have been working on for the last two months. The drawing is titled "Ars Moriendi", "The Art of Dying". I won't be making drawings of this size for a while, one of the main reasons being that it is a lot harder to keep an eye on your overall composition when the piece is so big you can't see the left side while you work on the right side. I'm getting much better photos taken by a friend; I will not be scanning this piece. I should post a mini-essay with that photo. In the meantime, enjoy these two pictures.

JGABBA 2

This is the second in a series of EP's I'm releasing online. They're really a kind of atrocious pop/dance parody. This one has a lot of obscure IDM and techno samples, and noise as well. The next one is coming along nicely!

http://www.mediafire.com/?29ux1navr9ka711

MORE PREVIEWS...

Here are a few more previews of the large drawing I am still working on. The center is done in a kind of hatched Bruegel style, and the edges are stippled, in a more realistic style. There will be more text soon, used in such a way that it actually adds to the overall meaning of the piece, instead of confusing. The drawing name drops/borrows from the bible, the ars moriendi, the endless blockade, aspects of Bosch's garden of earthly delights, Egyptian mythology, Insect Warfare and Mercyful Fate. The ars moriendi, or "art of dying", is a 15th century medieval book which literally covers the procedures for dying. This included piety, faith and guidelines for the life one should lead up until their death, as well as the procedures one should undertake when on their deathbed.

Death and religion were larger preoccupations for 15th century Europeans than they are for us today, the ars moriendi is simply an easy example. The two themes walked hand in hand in virtually every Bosch painting, as well as many other Flemish masterworks and Durers more popular commissioned work.

The drawing itself shows how many religions, from buddhism and jainism to zoroastrianism, judaism and christianity/catholicism, worship their dead and spend much of their energies around rituals of preparing for death. Oftentimes, body parts too numerous to list or even entire corpses of dead saints or monks are worshipped, which I'm finding out is as much a buddhist phenomenon as it is a christian/catholic one. During the relic boom of the 14th century, hundreds of European churches claimed to possess the true remains of a number of saints. The shroud of Turin has no recorded history before the middle ages, and that artifact serves as a perfect example of what this piece looks at: religious objects which crystallize the fear of death and promise of life eternal. Some religions take this a step too far and have created churches/temples where, essentially, death itself is being worshiped in a very supplicating way.

PREVIEW

Hey. This is a tiny preview of a very large piece I'm working on. The piece is going to be 32 or 34 inches by 50 inches, and for this reason, I won't have too many drawings completed for the next little while. The drawing is an allegory for the way most religions worship death as a major part of their doctrine. Bruegel is proving to be a wonderful influence, and his dense, dense paintings of peasant festivals probably got me going on this one. More on this to come...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!~1

Elf Pussy

This is a poster for a pornographic film which hasn't yet been made, the first screenprint I have made in a long long time. Thanks to Tobias Williams for the help on this one. The names of the actresses are taken from the index of the Silmarillion, and a lot of the borders and organic designs are inspired by Mucha's compositions and background fills. Four colour screenprint.

WAR (part ii)

These are photos of the 7th piece of the year, one centered around war. The large block of text is from the first book of the first book of The Lord of the Rings, and it was a great starting point for a historical look at war which works in modern times as a metaphor, seeing as no one really fights wars for gold anymore. I was really planning to do eight of these, but I feel I've said everything there is to say about dismemberment, lich kings, necromancy, war and utopia. At least for a few weeks. So I'm going to be drawing some lighter things while I think about what I'm saying, and how I'm going to say it. Expect silly things, before I return with more black and white history lessons.

PUNKS IS HIPPIES

This is the sixth piece for the year 2012, before I stop and start thinking "really hard" about what I'm "trying to say" with my art. I've been thinking about small stylistic changes.

This drawing is much more direct than many I have been doing this year. There are drawings based around war and dismemberment, and there are drawings based on utopia. The latter are obviously going to reference Bosch, but also GISM and flux of pink indians. The utopia drawings are much more organic and simple, they don't have a lot of right angles and hard lines (save for the text) because they are devoid of the icons and structures humans have made. They have more plants and animals and are "organic".

Also, there is some Darkthrone in there, hence the Fenriz gag I posted previously.

FENRIZ

Too old, too cold.

ASH BORER

Hello!

It's great when things go great. Ash Borer pressed a reissue of their demo LP, and they went all out. It is letterpressed, I believe it's also foilstamped, and their is a hand screened print of a drawing I made for this release, and it's 12x24.

It's a beautiful package. Also, the music is amazing.

http://dekorlabor.blogspot.de/2012/03/ash-borer-demo-lp-cover-siebdruck.html

http://psychicviolence.bigcartel.com/product/ash-borer-demo-lp-pre-order

You can view the LP art, and you can (and should) also order one.

Many thanks to Kyle for being a hoot to work with.

WAR

This is the 5th of 8 or so pieces in the "new body of work". This drawing is about war; most of the pieces I've completed this year are pairs which show one theme spread over two drawings. This drawing borrows from the epic poem Beowulf, the imagery of Infest, Systematic Death, Insect Warfare, Crash Worship, Durer and the lyrics of Insect Warfare and Seized. Seized were from Quebec and played sludge in the late nineties. They played that sludge on three basses. I don't think anyone can top that. There will be another war piece of the same size, using Tolkien for the text.

#4

This is the fourth piece I've done for the series I'm working on, based loosely around Durer's Apocalypse series. This drawing was unusual for me because the template/basis for it was simply a handful of landscape photographs. There are going to be two contrasting mini-sets I'm doing within the series, one focusing on nature in its untouched state, and another on humanity's structures. This pictures belongs to the first mini-set; there are no people in it, no buildings, very few right angles. This was a very different piece to draw.

TWSD 1

LICH KINGS

Hello.

I'm doing more works based on the Lich. The lich is also combined with the structures and insitutions of man, rigidity and altering the natural world. This allows for drawings with a greater emphasis on hard angles, symmetry, symbols and architecture-like geometry.

The bottom of this drawing is based on Infest's Slave LP, though the actual LP isn't that yellow. The middle half of the drawing uses quartz crystals as the basis for ruined buildings. Apart from the lich theme, Zoroastrian funeral rituals inspired the piece; large structures called Dakhma are built to house the dead as they decompose. This is done so that neither earth nor fire is polluted by the corpse, which is picked clean by vultures and rain.

It's actually a lot more complicated than that, but I'm an artist, not an anthropologist.

LICH

Hi.

This is a dodgy photograph of the latest drawing I've done. It's based around the D&D character class "Lich". A lich is a sorceror or king who is essentially a magically animated corpse, often they have traded their lives or body parts for magical knowledge and immortality. Not zombies.

The theme works well with what I'm doing, and lends itself to a lot of religious allegory, viscera, black and death metal references, and Noothgrush lyrics. If Noothgrush is reading this, let's work out a deal.

NEW WORK

Hi all, I'm totally not dead. I have however taken a lot of time to draw the largest stippling-only piece I've ever made. I probably won't be doing it again, it's really bad on the wrist.

The drawing was made for the American Black Metal band Ash Borer, for the rerelease of their first cassette. I'll be posting more information on the release itself when I have it handy. Ash Borer is a very good band whose musicianship and attention to detail will set them above other acts in time to come.

The drawing itself is based on Dore's The Tempest, or Back into the Tempest. I was planning to add staircases and bones and such, but there is a haunting, eerie quality to the original which deserves not to be spoiled with more details.

NEW WORK

This is the first in a series of drawings which are inspired by Durer's Apocalypse prints. Apocalypse is a word often misused in modern times, it literally means "lifting the veil", the apocalypse, supposedly, was a time when great truths would be unveiled. It has become synonymous with "end times" or "Armageddon".

Taking these ideas into account, and totally giving up on using the book of revelations for material, my series looks at ideas of utopia and dystopia, power and the environment. A lot of people forget that nature is awesome. If god created the heavens and the earth, then they should be worshipped above the bible, the instruction manual on who to kill and when. Without getting too pretentious here, the pieces place the natural world above human endeavours and creations.

There should be 8 to 12 of these, I can't decide on a really cool number.

ULSK

These are some rough drawings for a comic I hope to make one day, if I can figure out the variables. I talk about wizards a lot, Ulsk is a wizard who is always hooded. Ulsk is accompanied by a thief, named Thief. I've been reading a lot of Philippe Druillet, Moebius and Vaughn Bodē, especially his Cheech Wizard strip. If Ulsk coalesces into something simple and doable, it will be a sword and sorcery type strip with quests and temples and armies and magic. Basically something a person who grew up with D&D, Magic: The Gathering, The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and various less famous versions of all of these things would try to make one day.

You may notice that Thief bears striking resemblance to a character in an earlier post.

I am working on "serious art" as well, it just isn't ready to photograph yet. Sometimes a line drawing that took twenty minutes to make can be more fulfilling than a drawing which took twenty days.

Edit: About a week after drawing this, I realize that Thief has DeForge eyes. Oops?

Logos

This is the first incarnation of a logo I'm probably going to use a few times in the years to come. The logo itself is a serpent devouring the sun. Thematically and stylistically, the logo is inspired by the untouchable Crass logo which Dave King originally made for Penny Rimbaud. That logo depicts several symbols associated with power, and to Crass, bad power: the swastika of the Nazis, the cross, elements of the Union Jack but also an ourobouros. The Crass logo is insanely perfect in its rotational symmetry and its ease in stencilling.

The reason behind my logo is to critique superstition; world myths began as a way of explaining natural phenomena (rain gods, wind gods, forest gods, lightning gods) and I see no reason not to put any of the major religions in the same category. After dozens of attempts at using and dismantling religious icons, I came upon this idea as a catch-all; irrational belief in any form is counterproductive and probably fear based.

The serpent in my logo was inspired by a Mayan relief from the 7th century, mostly in the look of the mouth.

The smaller symbol inside is a monogram, MAC, made to look like a moon over three mountains.

BLACK METAL

This is a rough draft of the logo for a band I'm in with Patrick Kyle.

Black metal logos are probably the best kinds of logos. Often symmetrical, they can be cheesy or indecipherable or ugly or completely abstract. Bands with horrible production and darker riffing tend to use scratchier, uglier logos. Bands with geometric, symmetrical logos are probably going to be newer, and American.

Being in a band is a good excuse to draw cool logos.