hex

 

Hexagram.

Digital illustration for the Specters and Dreams series.

This doesn't seem to have transferred to the web very well. No idea why. I will look into it later.

For weird siblings everywhere.

xxx

Feathered dark in thought

Red Haired Girls

 Red Muses

Islands of the Mad

Digital illustration.

I wanted to present them as large as possible, so please forgive the intrusive watermarks.

Title inspired by the colleced poems of Sylvia Plath.

Especially:

"....In faith

we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail

among sacred islands of the mad till death

shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real."

(Tale of a Tub)

"There is a panther stalks me down:

One day I'll have my death of him;

His greed has set the woods aflame,

He prowls more lordly than the sun.

Most soft, most suavely glides that step,

Advancing always at my back;

From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:

The hunt is on, and sprung the trap."

(Pursuit)

"...Feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook,

brooding as the winter night comes on."

(Winter Landscape, With Rook)

xxx

silver

The Star Maiden

Silver

 Digital painting, acrylic, watercolour, photomontage, charcoal.

Inspired by Russian folk tales.

We are knee deep in snow here. Pretty, and cold!

xxx

Nocturnal tales

 

Spectral creatures.

Star bound.

Digital painting, acrylic, merged.

Not sure what to title this.

Will write more when I have the time!

xxx

Ghosts in the valley...

For the Singing Tree series.

Digital drawing/painting.

Will title later.

xxx

Growing

Growing

Digital drawing.

For the Singing Tree.

xxx

Cat Heaven

 

Cat Haven.

Or Cat Heaven.

This took forever. And it only began as a lighthearted experiment for the Singing Tree. I was inspired by medieval tapestries, those which usually feature white hounds, unicorns, hunters and chaste ladies. So I wound up carried away. Once you begin something like this, it is pretty difficult to know where to stop..........

Digital drawing.

xxx

Coterie

This isn't quite finished. I will probably return with an edited version at some point over the weekend. Maybe this evening. I am going to York tomorrow to visit a railway museum, which is really weird! Weirder than this image, I should think.

"We're not exclusive.......we're just alone"

They are triplets, I suppose, yet one and the same. Sharing the same thoughts, desires and wild imaginings, yet at differing levels of consciousness. Ultimately this is what they represent, three different states of awareness. I seem to be really into this sort of thing at the moment: like there's a part of me that has been aching to explore such themes, visually, for a long time. They are kind of like the 'nucleus' for me, the very thing which drives my desire to create. Always. Themes which have played an enormous role in my own life, and are incredibly difficult to translate outside of art. They are like giving voice to mute, unwordable emotions, as if the ordinary, physical world isn't flexible (or forgiving) enough to accomodate them.

The bird headed girl is entirely unconscious, mute, functioning on a primal level only. The wilderness posesses her, it's like a love affair that I might be almost envious of. Forever alert, unquestioning, a living dream. This is such a transient state, perhaps, like when we are very young children? A sort of short-lived, potentially deadly romance, in which the universe itself has the starring role.

The open-eyed girl, obviously, represents wakefulness, self realization and a battle to survive. This is the least enviable state, but the most nessecary. I don't know why. Can total awareness ever be devoid of some sort of pain? Her stare disturbs me. Her hair like a living fur cloak, protective, unhinged! And the bird headed girl inflicted the injury upon her forehead. Such conflicts are compulsory in this little coterie. How else can the unconscious, mute little thing get her messages across!?

Nightmares function a little like this, don't they? To bring forth a vital realization, the nightmare - seething with so many potentially terrifying truths, the likes of which our wakeful minds should prefer to remain oblivious - becomes manifest here as a living wound.

And speaking of oblivion:

The girl in the middle. She appears to be a bit of a contradiction. She appears to be the most serene, tolerant, restful, but this is merely the visage of blissful ignorance (I recall Dickens' words in 'A Christmas Carol', when Scrooge meets the spirit of death, who appears to be hiding two small beings beneath his cloak. When asked what they are, the spirit reveals two small children to Scrooge, as representations of the enemy of mankind. One of them is the symbol of 'want', the other the symbol of 'ignorance'. The spirit informs Scrooge that although less physically obvious, ignorance is the greatest enemy of all - I was really moved by this - my favourite version being the one with Patrick Stewart ♥).

The most important aspect of this work, for me, is the landscape. Lately, they seem to have come alive somehow, and will generally guide the rest of the image for me, once created. They consist of a combination of both digital and traditional painting, the layers of which I merge together for the final piece. These are living landscapes, which have as much to say as the human or animal characters that populate them. Recently, they are dark, twilit, or simply dismal looking, but I'm loving how the various elements within the image are somehow illuminated by the darkness, how it seems to lend them a special sort of potency.

So this is yet another fairytale, at the end of the day. Maybe even allegorical. I feel as though I am actually more 'present' in these latest pieces than usual. I just can't explain why. My explanations are like fumbling around in the dark, perhaps, but it has been fun trying to describe them. I don't tend to write very much about my images these days, and often fear that my words appear somewhat pretentious, even though they are just me at my most candid, really This is just the way my mind turns over when I contemplate what I have created. I only come to understand them after they are made, (like with dreams) rarely before, but I certainly experience some kind of feeling beforehand about where I want a certain image to go.

xxx

Keepers

Keepers (detail)

Keepers (full version)

Digital painting/illustration/collage.

For the Specters and Dreams series.

Some of my works remain elusive, even to myself. Sometimes I like to dress up nightmares in pretty frocks with ribbons attached. Keepers remains faithful to my ongoing fascination with memory, the unconscious and dreams. My boyfriend responded instantly with 'David Lynch!', but I replied, indignantly, "No! It's Dorothea Tanning!". I always mail new pieces to my parents (usually at some ungodly hour of the night) so that they can meet my latest anomalies over their morning coffee. This time my mother asked me what on earth had terrified her so, for her hair to stand on end.

Well, not terror at all. Just some surreal, transformative skullduggery. I was so pleased with the landscape, which took me quite a few sessions to paint, and the scene, the situation, with  its accompanying characters, seemed to grow out of the landscape itself somehow, as if they were born of it. I sometimes perceive my characters to have grown a little bit older - this time a girl on the cusp of adolescence - and their surroundings appear to have leapt into tune with them, often suggesting adventures into the unknown. And all of this, of course, is usually about me, in the autobiographical sense, which tends to describe most of the works in the Specters and Dreams series. Livid, living symbols! The skulls may represent a burden, or ever-present presences, the ghosts of her past. These are my favourite visual themes; creating a sort of serenity which has so much potential for terror. I suspect that something unconsciously quite terrible has always informed/driven my art, although the process itself brings such pleasure (to me!), transforming the darkness, those elusive flickers of memory into something tangible, ordered and (hopefully) quite positive/powerful.

I so wish that I could explain things just a tiny bit more eloquently. Perhaps this is why I make images instead of writing fiction (which was always my first love), because the images come so naturally, and their ongoing little fictions are already woven into them. And yet because of this, their private little fictions will have to remain eternally subject to the personal interpretation of each individual who 'reads' them.

There is a thunderous silence to Keepers, something which thrills and disturbs me to the core. The skull with the crown has such strong relevance for me, which any efforts at verbal translation could not justify. So, ultimately, so much remains hidden, both in translation and in the picture itself. A sort of revelation in half light.

Gosh, that was confusingly candid.

And speaking of fiction, I am currently reading two superdooper wonderful books: The Oxford Book of Short Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates, and a compilation of essays about the works of Angela Carter, entitled Flesh and the Mirror. So many new discoveries in the American Short Stories compilation, especially works by writers such as James Baldwin, Herman Melville and Henry James.

In shop related news, I am still awaiting the arrival of three, new Limited Edition books, which I am quite excited about because they are my first foray into hardback territory! A little bit expensive to produce, so there will only be the three available this time around - but I shall be looking to create more accessible options for after the new year. Do check my News page for more details.

xxx

Recognition

Recognition

Hollow

Digital painting and photomontage. For the Specters and Dreams gallery.

I have finally expanded my online gallery space here at my blog. A few new projects have been added (brought over from Flickr) this week, although several are still in progress. I can't wait to see it complete!

I like how the seven of hearts/spades keeps on turning up in recent images. Something which links them all, inexplicably. Or secretly. The Recognition girl keeps one arm behind her back, forever witholding something. Enigmas, both of them. Hugely symbolic. Where fantasy and nightmares overlap.

xxx