Exhumed: The Door

This piece was originally part of the Interior Life set.  With the Interior Life set I tried to find a middle ground between my more emotive works and my sequential art.  That set held some of the ideas and thought processes that would grow into much of my intent here at Zombie Bites.  I had imagined this hungry door as fiery from the moment I drew it.  With the color reinvestigation I wanted to bring that feeling of furnace / fireplace to the fore.

{8x6.503,  Sharpie with color added in Adobe Photoshop}

Interior Life from the Archives: The Wall

A bit of homage to Arthur Adams from New Mutants Special #1.  I was always fond of the Enchantress' hateful wall.  This also falls into that same category with the inanimate coming to life.  So...if you're exploring a haunted castle or catacombs, don't stand too close to the walls eh?

This condenses one of those horrible days where it seems like the entire world is set against you into a single moment.  "You're not going anywhere boy - we have a very comfy place for you here inside the wall!  Hold still."  EEP.

Just my brief comment on how vexed I get sometimes by the practical inanimate world.  It seems our little bits of stuff control us in many ways.  Cell phones, cars, clothes, dishes, shoes, TV's, gaming platforms, computers, furniture...a laundry list of inanimate things that control our actions and decisions.  We are forced into a slavery by their very presence.  Their comfort leads us into a languid torpor and should we try to escape them, we find their gravity to be insatiable and insidious.    We all become, indeed, bricks in the wall.  Mind you, I'm not saying that homelessness or poverty are great, but at what point does having our every want met become just another drug?  Who is served by the Omnipresence of THINGS?  Who Benefits?

{Pen & Ink}

Interior Life from the Archives: The Door

More dark feelings from the inside.  I can't remember the inspiration for this piece. hmmm...Perhaps too much D&D or Marvel Comics.  I really cannot remember.  Ah Age.

It reminds me somewhat of the theme of the mouth of hell in many medieval pieces, but without the demons pouring out...not yet.   Ah, the malice of the inanimate suddenly come to unfriendly life.  EEP!  Or perhaps how the gateway of initiation looks to the initiate.  So strange, because there is only light on the other side.  The darkness and bitey teeth are on this side of the door.  

Of course you never want something larger than you coming at you with its mouth open.  I think perhaps this is why babies cry when surrounded by large groups of adults smiling and opening and closing their mouths.  They think we're going to eat them.  That must be it.  It is the ghost of Jaws come back to haunt yet again.  Steven Spielberg and Peter Benchley - you have a lot to answer for!  Not really - Thanks for the Nightmares!  :-)

It all boils down to a fear of being eaten.  Of nature turning and losing one's place in the food chain to something greater or more powerful, of being eaten by the bigger beast.  It is what makes us fear the the Zombie, the predatory Vampire, the hive-minded Alien, and the savage Werewolf.  This is the face the prey animal fears.  Because if it is this large and this close, the face of the greater beast is the last thing you'll see.

{Pen & Ink}

UPDATE 070914:

This piece was Exhumed and reinvestigated with color in July 2014.  Check out the Exhumed image here.

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.}