From the Archives: Angry Guy

Occasionally my angry faces will go a bit cartoony.  Here is one such from the traveling sketchbook.

{Sharpie}

Frustration

Blocked energy only builds.  Emotions escape the vessel as billowing clouds of steam.  The body melts and transforms under these stresses.  Soon, the changes will be irrevocable.

Archaeology of the Light

Surface niceties reveal hidden demons.  Dig deep, double check your sources, learn the smell of a lie.  On a personal level, this reflects my inability to conceal my rage despite many and varied efforts.  Blood always shows through, whether its your own or someone else's.

At the Bottom of Everything

Within the vast mucoid detritus of our lives,

lurk the forgotten and the exiled,

the denied and the refuted,

all the wretched furies never given voice or form.

The Assassination Machine

The sword and the pen are the merely the fangs of something more insidious.

Recommended Listening:

NIN

Head Like A Hole

from Pretty Hate Machine

{Digital Images manipulated in Adobe Photoshop}

Friday the 13th: Vault of Shadow

Here's a little dark nugget to entertain on what promises to be at the very least an interesting Friday the 13th!  Over the next two days we have Uranus going retrograde as well as Mercury going retrograde.  This promises a certain level of intrigue as just a regular Mercury retrograde is usually enough to facilitate a great deal of mischief.  Enjoy the ride and try to hold on to your tempers as this is going to be a bumpy weekend.

Beware the Ignorant

The empty vessel is a dangerous door.

The Second Phase: His Ire

Revelation of a truth about my nature, and perhaps the face of one of the entities who occasionally walks with my feet.

Observation of the Supplicant before the Throne

On the wings of thought and desire,
I send my petition into the other.

UPDATE Sketchbook Archives: Scream

Another of the Rescans.  When I glanced at this rescan, I didn't think there was much change between this one and the original, but once I saw the two together, there is a definite improvement!  Please check out the old post and compare.

Thee Prison of Flesh

A friend of mine is in prison.  Thinking of the life he is forced to lead within those walls has made me think a great deal on freedom and what that word truly means.  I wonder at the pressurizing effects of that kind of incarceration on human consciousness. When natural movement is forbidden by physical restraint and social strictures, the feedback creates extreme intensity and behavior that otherwise might not exist within an individual. I wonder sometimes if there is a better way.

I Raise Up My Light

It burns in my heart like an ingot of molten metal. Sometimes it moves to the forefront from the far reaches of my mind and boils over my view until I cannot see past this driving force.  There is no reason, just the scream, only the scream.

It will be free.  If I do not find a way to release it, it will seek its own purchase in the world.  It will strike like lightning, burning and breaking until it is spent.  The surge of blood.  The great red sea.  The Odin force.  The Kundalini.  The opening of the great eye. The life death scream of the hawk.  When it wakes, the world trembles.

There is an older piece I created in graphite that is a sister piece to this one.  I will get a photo of that one soon.  It is larger than my normal work.  Also, It was packed away during the move and will need to be extracted.

Recommended Listening:

VnV Nation

Lightwave

Matter+Form

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

From the Sketchbook Archives: Scream

Looking back, I think this may be an indirect portrait of someone unpleasant I was working with at the time.  Anger and Sharpies - cheaper than therapy I guess.

Recommended Listening:
The Prodigy
Omen
Invaders Must Die

{Sharpie}

 UPDATE:

Wow.  Initially I didn't there was much change between these two, but looking at them side by side I can a severe blur and glare within the original.  The scan turned all the colors up a notch or two as well.  I cannot say it enough - Hooray for scanner!  Hmmmm...my scanner needs a name...I'll get on that.  :-)

Suicide Set Part V: If Flesh Could Crawl

I’m including this piece in the suicide set even though technically it was not in the same format as the other pieces or even part of the set.  It was done just before the others...maybe two or three weeks.  I feel the need to include it because this type of thing doesn’t occur in a vacuum.  It was directly inspired by the song As Far From God from the first Garbage album.

I would like to note on the side of safety and communication that today, despite the difficulty of my current set of life circumstances, that I do not in any way feel suicidal.  It is simply that the time has come to share these pieces.

{Sharpie}

UPDATE 010413:

This piece was Exhumed and reinvestigated with color in November 2013.  Check out the Exhumed image here.

Suicide Set Part III: Blame

Sister of guilt and father of shame, blame is the negative spotlight eye of God.  There is nowhere to hide.  Blame makes it impossible to move for fear of suffering and sorrow. Blame is the fire of torture now turned to self immolation.  The hand that burns me now is my own.  Blame is the self fulfilling prophecy of "it is all my fault." All of it. If it wasn't my fault before, after blame is finished, it will be.

I would like to note on the side of safety and communication that today, despite the difficulty of my current set of life circumstances, that I do not in any way feel suicidal.  It is simply that the time has come to share these pieces.

{Sharpie}

The Burning

This is me trying to sort out my fiery emotions.  Kind of hard when they gang up.  My original intent was to find a release for my emotional intensity.  I was creating this piece at the time the London riots were beginning, but I had no idea they were occurring until 3 days later. 

I'm having a lot of trouble figuring this one out.  I was actually intensely angry when I was working on this piece.  Now it is almost like looking at a firepit after it has been put out.  You remember the warmth and the smoke and maybe you burned your finger or something, but now there is just a black spot and some ashes and the acrid smell that something burned here.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

EGO

Ah, the pride of ego. It can get us into many a tight spot. There may be more than ego involved here, but my first thought when I was finished was EGO. My original idea headed into it was Rage, but in the middle of that explosive flame, I found this little blue faced guy. A cool center to the radius of flame and destruction.

If I could have fire instead of hair I would. As long as I could turn it off and be invulnerable to its affects. LOL.  I'm sure I would have to buy shirts and hats more often, but you have to admit, it would look cool.  :-)  No such luck there.  Burned my finger yesterday with hot glue gun.  Now I have an ugly alien looking blister on my thumb.  Hooray...and ouch.

{Digital Images manipulated in Photoshop}

Interior Life From the Archives: Panther Rattler

And now for something completely different...well not really.  The next few drawings were from the same period as my other Interior Life posts from Trail of Bread Crumbs: Sunrise, The Old Blue Man, and The Well.  However, the ones I'm posting here have a definite darker edge.  Welcome to my dark corners.  (Thank you Garth Marenghi!)

When I created this piece and the ones that will follow, I was trying to find some kind of balance between my commercial goals for my art and my emotional needs for my art.   There has always been a therapeutic aspect to my work as well as it being a descriptive litmus for the current state of my life.  Selling that out completely to commercial control seemed ill advised...that and I'm sure I'll never be able to affordable a proper therapist.  So why throw away a perfectly good tool for self analysis and growth?!?  Instead I tried to blend the two by making my emotional works a little more commercially presentable.  I'm not sure it worked all that well in the end as I am currently unemployed, but what do you do?  LOL.  Ah Life!

My idea here was of turning some of my darker feelings into functional illustrations.  This is me on a bad day...a very bad day.  I think this may have been the lurking demon of the steroid, Prednisone.  I took that hateful drug for 4 months and it took me years to recover from its effects.  I would not recommend it to anyone.  It made me psychotic and when I tried to explain it to my doctor he just looked at me and nodded and smiled.  So I did some research and learned what I needed to do to ween myself off it, then went to a nutritional therapist at the suggestion of my friend Su.

Prednisone is the reason I have very little faith in the medical community.  The answer is always - "yeah but you're alive".  QUALITY of life is also extremely important. I wish for anyone who says something like that to be required to take Prednisone until they've eaten their way to 35 pounds heavier in four months, are punching walls at least once a week, are crying themselves to sleep every night, and are laughing and crying at the same time whenever they have ANY kind of emotion...but YEAH...I was alive.
I was just out my F@%&#&^ mind.

(prying his white knuckled hands from the podium, he steps down from the soap box)  Oops...Sorry about that.  Prednisone was a bad experience for me and my doctor was apathetic about its effects on me.  Anyway - how bout that crazy cave creature I drew!

I was worried at first about posting this text because of the intensity of my feelings concerning Prednisone, but I realized that this text matches the drawing quite nicely.  So it stays. 

{Pen & Ink.}

Rage

Rage

a little bit of dark self portrait here...
not something I really like to admit about myself.

{Digital Images manipulated with Adobe Photoshop.}