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.