MOVING

You should be able to find me here:

morgancriger.tumblr.com

SAILOR MOON

This is really just a silly picture of a poster I drew over. More cosmic drawings will follow this celestial drawing – I'm nearly finished the companion piece to my drawing of the fractal and star cluster.

Sarina says: Plan your tattoos wisely. Consider bilateral symmetry and colour schemes in your overall tattoo layout.

COSMOS

This drawing was inspired by a number of works; two songs and two Medieval documents. The songs, Noothgrush's Deterioration in the upper banner, and Krallice's The Clearing, outline the totally incomprehensible scope of the universe, and the insignificance of humanity in comparison. A text which appears in the right hand column, is from Giordano Bruno's On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, one of many books he wrote which resulted in his being labelled a heretic and his subsequent persecution. Bruno was born in the sixteenth century and expounded a number of revolutionary beliefs; in an infinite number of worlds like our own, in a heliocentric universe, and in pantheism.

Naturally, this got him in a great deal of trouble, and like many progressive thinkers, he was murdered for it.

The two Medieval texts are an alchemical image usually referred to as The Music of the Spheres, and St Anselm of Canterbury's Meditations. The former depicts a Greco-Roman inspired hierarchy, depicting gods and the known planets, along with a giant serpent. The latter is a very inspired manuscript, whose capitals (the ornate, illustrated letters at the beginning of paragraphs, which we associate with the idea of illuminated manuscripts) are (mini) masterpieces of composition and creativity.

The giant snake is a nod to the snake logo I've made (and blogged) in the past, a snake eating the sun, which is apparently what some people thought occurred during an eclipse. As well, it looks like the snake in the Music woodcut, and it recalls Jormagund and the Ouroborus.

WAYNE'S WORLD

Just a small picture of Wayne and Garth as Laverne and Shirley, from the Milwaukee montage. Garth is hard to drawn accurately, without completely exaggerating the overbite / gopher thing Dana Carvey is doing. Things which make sense will be coming shortly...

PS - It's Algonquin for "the good land".

INDRICOTHERE IV

This is the completed art for the back cover of the Indricothere LP. There is definitely going to be some text added to this; recording information, thanks, label info – that kind of thing. But this is the art itself - it's totally done. I can't really pin down what inspired the general look here, Privat Livemont's Art Nouveau poster for Absinthe Robette, the Hapshash and the Coloured Coat LP cover, photos of nebulae. The plant-like mass at the bottom is definitely a riff on the floral details in St. Anselm's Meditations, but also it vaguely resembles the Indricothere logo I came up for the front cover. As the Indricothere is a giant vegetarian mammal (which has a metal band named after it) I made this twisted mass of vinelike plant structures to reinforce that theme a bit more, and made it really intricate because, after all, this is technical death metal.

The Indricothere page is here. http://indricothere.bandcamp.com

DLAHP II

This is the scanned cover for my comic, Drug Lion and Handsome Panda. It's a two panel gag comic about a foppish panda who lives with a stoner lion. Handsome panda has exquisite taste, but (for reasons never explained) he lives with a talking lion who is usually zonked on psychoactive drugs. It's a great premise which allows me to make fun of and reference a lot of funny and different things. There are twelve strips in this comic, one of which was drawn by Lee Wiesblatt. I'm getting it printed as soon as I can...

INDRICOTHERE III

This is the final draft of the logo for the band Indricothere. Process process! I've blown it up to about 300% to make it crisper and clean up all of the overlaps and spikes. I'm starting on the back cover, which in a lot of ways can be more fun than the back cover. You can draw crazy things because it's on the back of the album. The reverse side should look much more like a manuscript than the front of the album; there will be blackletter roman numerals for the tracklisting, and the logo will be redrawn (again...) in a more floral style, like the borders of some manuscript illuminations. The reverse cover should be a bit more cosmic, but will tie the two sides together by repeating the logo, the black and white scheme and the op art visual effects.

TIME

This is the fourth drawing in my series of manuscript pages. The drawing is about the passage of time and our imminent deaths; what we do between birth and death. The bottom section is an interpretation of (one of) Bosch's St. Anthony paintings. St. Anthony was tempted (supposedly) by demons and women. St. Anthony, here, is tempted by musicians, fame and riches, books, women and, in general, civilization.

The drawing references Tolkien in a few places, on the left next to the phases of the moon are the names of the month which he devised for use by the inhabitants of The Shire, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, although there are many instances in the latter work of Hobbits using the names of our months. As well, there is a Gandalf quote on the right hand side, above a quote from the Iliad about the ephemeral nature of being alive. There were a few more quotes of this nature, one especially good one from Beowulf, but I've reserved that for the page which is explicitly about death and dying. These pages are meant to be easier to “get” than my earlier drawings, and as such, they have fewer band references and fewer themes per page.

The middle, six panel section borrows format and concept from Roman de la Rose, this one drawn by the scribe Girart de biaulieu. This was the most popular text in medieval times, a secular prose poem about courtly love and female sexuality. It has survived to this day in hundreds of hand made copies.

INDRICOTHERE II

This is the current draft of my logo for the band Indricothere. The bubble letters are gone, instead the whole thing has gotten much more pointy and messier, it looks more like a black metal logo now than before. The symmetry has been preserved and the plant/tendril filigree is essentially the same.

This version has been okayed, so I'm going to start on the reverse of the album cover, and then the front.

INDRICOTHERE I

I've begun working on an album cover for the one-man technical death metal project Indricothere. The Indricothere itself was the largest land mammal of all time, a kind of giraffe sized rhinoceros. The Indricothere in question is one of the many, many projects of multi instrumentalist Colin Marston, who releases fantastic, intricate music at a prolific rate.

In this vein, I've been asked to draw up a new logo, which is always a hoot. The first step is to count the letters, and look to see if the middle two letters (if the band title has an even number of letters) are somewhat similar. The middle two letters of Indricothere are “o” and “c”. This is good. There are countless approaches to creating a band logo, I prefer them to be messy, hyper detailed, illegible and symmetrical.

Colin asked me to do something like that for the logo. The first draft shows a big influence from Roger Dean's work on the Yes album covers, and also the Dystopia logo, drawn by Dino Sommese (in an interview for Profane Existence, Dystopia has said that they made new fans when people came to their shows expecting to see rap music, due to their logo). This direction wasn't exactly perfect, so I started on a much gorier, drippier, sloppier kind of logo, which isn't quite done yet. But it looks great!



The last one here is my work in progress on the logo...

DLAHP

I visited Tolkien's grave recently, and worked it into this comic.

I started drawing a comic called “Drug Lion and Handsome Panda”. It's a two panel gag comic with a very simple premise: a drug addled lion lives with a foppish panda. Hilarity ensues. The minimalism of the plot and requirements needed to set up a punch line in two panels have actually proved very inspiring, and it's forced me to get very creative to come up with something good, and worth reading again later. I've also made jokes which allow me to draw things which I really like; Tolkien, outer space, other comic characters, medieval details.

I should have this for sale at TCAF. Until I begin getting it printed, I shouldn't say much more at this point...



This is not an April Fool's Day post!

MAC

I like Tolkien. This has been established. Tolkien drew a monogram at one point in his career, and since his death his son and estate have used it to brand his output. It has become a kind of trademark or “stamp” upon his canonical as well as his posthumous work. I don't believe the symbol appeared on any of his first editions. Nevertheless, the simplicity and quasi-mystic occult look of the monogram can't be overstated; it is an amazing symbol.



Following in his Gandalfy footsteps, I've made a monogram from my three names. While I was inspired to do so after seeing his monogram, mine bears little resemblance to Tolkien's, instead it looks more like a band logo. The monogram shows M, as two triangular peaks, with an A between them. The little crescent moon over the top is the C of my last name. It does bear some resemblance to Leviathan's logo, and Storm's Nordavind album cover; a moon over mountaintops. The fact that this monogram is bilaterally symmetrical allows me to make this strange “knot”, which looks like the Norse walknut, a gordian knot, or the Japanese triforce / fishscale mon I sometimes use. It also looks like the fancy “sacred geometry” design that is getting popular after a few centuries of Kabbalistic obscurity. But mainly, it's just my name three times with an extra triangle.

RUNES

This is the third drawing I've made for this manuscript series/project. The drawing is basically an explanation of the runes I've created, and what runes are, in a general historical sense.

Runes are angular letters used by the peoples of ancient Europe. They were carved into metal, stone or wood, and hence do not make use of curved lines. The most famous set of runes is the Futhark, used by the Norse. Tolkien's Cirth runes draw heavily from these runes. I have not drawn heavily from either set, being influenced by the Japanese Katakana alphabet, I have gone for simplicity, not linguistic correctness, and so my alphabet is quite small. Katakana employs a small mark called a diacritic (they call it a hakuten, I believe), this mark shifts their “g” into their “k”, from a voiceless to a voiced consonant. Taking this idea, I've managed to reduce my alphabet to eighteen runes, some of which stand for more than one letter. Letters like C and Q do not have their own runes. Ha!

The illuminated parts of the drawing reference old manuscript details, specifically of books and monks and saints and scholars copying books or studying. The mistletoe in the background is a druidic fertility symbol, and the oak that it is usually parasite to has significance in paganism. There are no visible band references in this drawing, which is pretty incredible. I cut a lot of details about gods of language and quasi masonic word magic from this drawing, and I think it is better for it, especially as this piece was meant to help people understand what I am doing. I am willing to help people.

NOOTHGRUSH II

This is the second of my manuscript drawings, and the second to focus Narrowly on the Californian sludge trio (now a quartet?!) Noothgrush. For more information about Noothgrushes, please refer to Dr. Seuss' "There's a Wocket in my Pocket".

I'm starting to understand more what manuscripts are all about, but this piece is still more heavily illuminated than any "true" Medieval manuscript would have been. The drawing focuses on Noothgrush's disdain for the human race, and the tendency of our species to upset the natural order and completely render anything we touch unlivable. Or dead. Noothgrush, as well as other bands around the mid nineties who played shows in the same scene, Grief, Man is the Bastard, Seized, expressed a misanthropic mindset, which sometime bordered onto actively promoting human extinction. This is an interesting concept when one realizes that the population of Europe did in fact almost face extinction during the time when these handmade books flourished, due to the spread of the bubonic plague. Noothgrush, however misanthropic you find them, do make salient points about the callousness of our species in regards to ecology, and especially our sense of entitlement and superiority, neither of which is founded on anything concrete. The text in this manuscript is from a 1997 interview, but it is informed by the same worldview which they held (and still do hold) while writing songs such as Stagnance and Useless.

I find the manuscript format quite appropriate when looking at these seemingly flippant, though very wise and well meaning words. Manuscripts were used to record knowledge, not just of canonical bible verses (and indeed the format of a handwritten bible is responsible for much of the look and format, and likely the errors too, in the modern bible) but also the teachings of various saints and lesser religious leaders. They were kept in monasteries and rewritten into other languages, after being borrowed, in whole or in piece, by other monks or scholars. I think that their is a great deal to be gained from looking at song lyrics, and interviews with bands from the grind/sludge/powerviolence, especially the cluster of great bands from the state of California.

NOOTHGRUSH

These are photos of the first page I've drawn in a series which will resemble unbound, oversize manuscript pages. There were a number of different types of hand written books in Medieval Europe, and though they served different purposes, we have come to kind of combine them in our heads over time. Some were secular, and some were sacred, some contained no illustrations, some were much more image heavy than others. I'm drawing upon two types of manuscripts, those which were for daily use by Medieval people, and those containing psalters, decretals and glosses of various saints and theologians. I'm going to make drawings which resemble manuscripts in their visual style (word heavy, use of blackletter, margins and illustrated borders and letters) but use band interviews and lyrics for their textual content. Essentially it is a kind of metal / hardcore zine, but made to resemble a very old religious text.

There is wisdom to be gleaned from old band interviews and their lyrics. Inasmuch as the bible and other religious texts and declarations (such as the famous reformation of Martin Luther) were read or memorized as part of daily Medieval life, contemporary lyrics and their accompanying philosophies serve a somewhat similar role to (a smaller group of) people today. Books like the Ars Moriendi, or Art of Dying, expounded upon a 15th century audience ideals of "how to die". People aimed to live in christ's image, to imitate him, to live well and to die well. My "book", really a series of page-like drawings, will instead expound upon a few themes found in the music of bands like Noothgrush, Man is the Bastard, Neanderthal, Insect Warfare and Dystopia: the idea that the human race is destructive, self destructive, superstitious and baser than the "animal" life on this planet. This applies to our creation of religion and systems of government and the reliance of these structures upon fear for control. In a way, this will be a kind of "punk" guide to life, intended to mimic early Medieval texts and offer a more humanist philosophy without demanding pious, impossible to follow behaviour, while acknowledging the flaws of our species to live harmoniously with one another or with the nature.

ANNWN

This is a drawing of Mick Barr, guitarist of Orthrelm, Krallice, Octis, Ocrilim...the first of many such drawings for a zine I would like to create. The zine will be a one off, a simple collection of drawings I've done of metalheads whose music I enjoy. Ideally, it would cover a good range of countries and genres, and the pictures themselves aren't going to look too “metal”; the aim being to find source images of these musicians offstage, just being really cool human beings. This is Mick's Blog, http://ocrilim.blogspot.ca/

HAPPY NEW YEAR

This is a quick little drawing of myself topless in front of a giant, highly stylized snake. I think that about sums it up.