I painted this at the Ashville Viking Festival in Ashville, Ohio this past weekend. It’s a charming festival held in late April every year. Entrance is by donating canned goods. It’s all for a good cause.
In Succession, the castle does not merely crumble, it yields. Its walls, once raised by human hands against sea, storm, hunger, and invasion, have become a pedestal for something older than heraldry. The red dragon rises where banners would have flown, its wings catching the blue violence of the sky, its body arched in possession, judgment, and inheritance.
The coast recedes into mist and cold water. The towers remain, though diminished, their silhouettes dark against the luminous sea. Civilization lingers here in broken masonry, carved crosses, hollow windows, and weathered walls, yet the painting belongs to the creature above them. The dragon is neither intruder nor ornament. It feels like the inevitable heir, the answer waiting inside the ruin long before the first stone was set.
This piece is about the fragile arrogance of permanence. Kingdoms build upward. Time answers from above.
The painting is sold.
A note about pieces I paint at festivals. If someone buys it off the easel, I give them the option of being a one of one, e.g. no prints will be made, or letting others buy prints. In this case, there will be no prints.
Succession, 20 x 24 inches, acrylic on canvas, sold.
Sometimes I paint things and forget to post them. This was completed in 2025.
A woman of the sea stands between revelation and concealment, her presence half offered, half withdrawn, as though the tide itself had shaped her from memory and foam. In Selkie’s Secret, I wanted the old northern folklore to remain intact, the sense that the sea keeps its own counsel, and that what emerges from it is never fully ours to name. The selkie belongs to that ancient border where longing, danger, beauty, and loss all wear the same face.
The Viking ship in the distance gives the scene its second heartbeat. It suggests pursuit, witness, or perhaps only passage, humanity moving across waters that were ancient before oar or sail ever touched them. Against that hard timber and mortal purpose stands the softer mystery of the seal-woman, bound to the shore, to the surf, and to the secret life beneath appearances. The image became, for me, less about narrative in the ordinary sense and more about the ache of legend itself, the feeling that some truths arrive only in glimpses, then recede.
Color carried much of the work. I wanted the blues to feel living and luminous, a sea that was beautiful without becoming tame. The misted forms and curling atmosphere at the left edge were meant to suggest that the world of myth is never entirely absent, it only waits for the right light, the right loneliness, the right silence. The painting leans into that threshold, where folklore is neither illustration nor ornament, but presence.
Selkie’s Secret is an offering to maritime myth, to northern stories, and to the old conviction that the sea remembers more than we do. 20×24″ acrylic on canvas.
Before the churches rose, before the calendars named the months, women walked the turning earth on bare feet and felt a pulse beneath them older than any catechism. This painting belongs to that elder country.
A woman dances at midnight among violet blossoms and dark loam, the ankles bound in thin chains. The damp ground below quickens with wildflowers and ribbons of teal brushwork, each stroke a small wind drawn through grass.
The Dance
The piece takes its subject from “The Quickening,” a song from Shattered Goddess. It attempts in pigment what the music attempts in voice and string: a return to the pre-modern sense of the earth as a living thing. The old faiths understood this. So did every midwife, herbalist, and practitioner who held the earth sacred.
There are charts for every sea. Degree by degree, the compass rose promises orientation, mastery, the civilised fiction that one always knows where one stands. The ring of numbers encircling this composition — 165, 180, 195, 210, 225 — speaks that language of navigation with calm authority, even as everything within it descends into beautiful catastrophe.
A tall ship rides the centre of the world, her furled sails the colour of bruised twilight, blue-violet against a sky of burning vermillion. The moon lingers behind her masts like a pale witness, uncommitted and cold. Below, the sea has already made its judgement: dark, frothing, circling inward in that particular way water moves when something vast displaces it from beneath.
The kraken comes not as surprise. It comes as verdict.
Those deep crimson tentacles do not merely attack — they catalogue. Each coil is deliberate, almost ceremonial, winding about hull and rigging with the patience of a thing that has outlasted a thousand such vessels. The contrast of that arterial red against the orange fire of the background gives the creature an almost volcanic quality, as though the deep itself has erupted.
And the compass rose watches. It measures nothing now. It records everything.
The title carries its full weight. There is no salvage operation equal to this reckoning. Available. Inquiries welcome.
Note: I finished this in 2025 – I just never posted it to the website.
Every painter who has ever picked up a brush in the last sixty years owes Warhol a debt and an argument. The debt is obvious — he proved that bold, flat colour against a strong ground could carry genuine spiritual weight. The argument is this: thirty-two Marilyns in a grid is magnificent once. It becomes wallpaper by the third print run.
This piece began as a tribute to exactly that tradition. Gold ground, high contrast, flattened form — the visual DNA of a Warhol screen print, translated into acrylic. Anubis as icon. The idea had merit.
Then the jackal had other plans.
Pop Psychopomp
Somewhere in the process the painting stopped being a tribute and started being a conversation. The anthropomorphic god refused to stay in his single frame, so a second panel arrived — the pure jackal form, recumbent, collared in red, ancient and watchful. A winged scarab claimed the upper left corner as its own territory. White geometric lines divided the surface like a comic book page, and suddenly the whole thing had the structure of sequential art rather than pop repetition.
Which, on reflection, is far more honest to the subject matter. Anubis is a god of passage and transformation. He does not stand still for his portrait. He guides, he weighs, he opens the way — three distinct functions rendered here as three distinct panels. Warhol’s genius was the freeze-frame, the idol held perpetually in amber. Anubis resists that entirely.
The gold ground remained. In Egyptian funerary art it signified the flesh of the gods, the light that persisted inside the Duat between one sunrise and the next. That much, Warhol and the Old Kingdom agree upon: gold means something permanent lives here.
Pop Psychopomp. The icon who refuses to be merely iconic. Available,
Original acrylic painting by Rob Medley. An ancient oak shelters a watchful owl while a raccoon moves through the autumn bracken below. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches. Inquire for price.
She stands where the mortal world thins and something older breathes through. Wreathed in mist beneath a blood moon, her raised hand channels what the forest remembers and civilization has long since forgotten. The aurora turns above her like a living wheel.
The Priestess
The Priestess explores the archetype of the feminine as sovereign conduit — not suppliant, not symbol, but the very vessel through which the numinous speaks. Painted in acrylics, she emerged from the same cosmological current running through the broader Kreative Forge body of work. 16×20” – Available.
Some fires destroy. Some fires reveal what survives them.
In this piece I imagined a witness to the end of the world. Cities fall, the sky burns, and the ground fills with the remains of what once lived. Yet even in the middle of ruin, something ancient continues its quiet work.
Branches bloom.
The figure carries death in her bones and life in her hair. Fire becomes a kind of crown, and the blossoms refuse the logic of extinction. The world collapses behind her, yet the tree grows anyway.
Rebirth rarely arrives gently. Sometimes it rises from ash, bone, and memory.
This painting sits in that strange moment between ending and beginning, when the smoke has not yet cleared and the future is still deciding whether it wants to exist.
Sometimes a song and a painting arrive at the same place by different roads.
While working on this piece I kept returning to the imagery from the Shattered Goddess song Brambles that I wrote. The lyrics speak about moving through a thicket of thorns in order to reach the place where something deeper began. It is not a path of comfort. It is a path of persistence.
“Follow the brambles down, down, down to the hidden ground Every wound I bear shows me the way there.”
That idea shaped the painting.
The figure shields the heart while thorned branches wrap across the body. Scratches mark the skin where the thorns have caught and dragged. Yet the brambles do not simply imprison the figure. They form a path downward, spiraling toward the center of the body where the light gathers.
The song suggests that wounds can become a map. Each mark left by the thorns shows where the traveler has passed. Instead of avoiding the bramble patch, the voice in the song chooses to follow it deeper.
“The thorns may make me bleed, but I must know the seed.”
In nature, brambles are protective plants. Their thorns keep larger creatures away while sheltering smaller life within the tangled growth. They are harsh on the outside, yet they guard something living at their center.
Human experience often works the same way. We accumulate scars, defenses, and memories that grow around us like a dense patch of thorns. At first they seem only painful. Over time they begin to reveal something else: a record of the path we have taken.
The painting reflects that moment. The figure is wounded, yet still illuminated from within. The brambles press inward, but they also guide the eye downward toward the place where life begins again.
Sometimes the way forward is not around the thorns.
The painting unfolds beneath a vast nocturnal sky where moonlight and firelight share the same stage, each illuminating the landscape in different ways. At the center of the composition a campfire burns intensely, its warm reds and oranges pushing outward against the cool indigo and violet tones of the night. This contrast between warm and cool light forms the emotional heart of the work. The fire gathers the figures, tents, and earth into a circle of life and community, while the moon casts a silvery wash across the surrounding wilderness, expanding the scene outward into quiet solitude.
Whispers by Firelight
The brushwork leans toward a light-driven impressionism, where form emerges through color and gesture rather than rigid detail. Clouds move in sweeping strokes that echo the movement of wind and atmosphere, creating a sense of motion in the sky. The trees stand skeletal and quiet, their silhouettes framing the scene like stage wings. These gestural marks allow the viewer’s eye to complete the image, a hallmark of impressionistic technique where suggestion carries as much weight as description.
Light itself becomes the true subject of the painting. The moon glows softly through the shifting clouds, bathing the landscape in a cool luminosity that dissolves edges and deepens the mystery of the forest. In contrast, the fire pulses with raw vitality, throwing sparks of color onto the tents and ground. The interaction between these two sources of light creates a layered visual rhythm, drawing the viewer inward toward the human gathering while still honoring the vastness of the surrounding night.
The scene ultimately becomes less about a specific place and more about atmosphere and memory. The viewer is invited into a moment suspended in time, where wilderness, community, and sky converge under a luminous moon. Through color harmony, expressive brushwork, and the interplay of natural light, the painting captures that timeless human ritual of gathering around fire beneath the open night.
I did not set out to paint a ghost story. I set out to paint a castle. Somewhere in the process, the painting decided what it wanted to be, which is something any painter who has spent serious time at the easel will recognize. You plan one thing and the canvas negotiates. Convergence is the result of that negotiation.
The castle came first. I have always been drawn to medieval architecture, to the logic of towers and curtain walls, to the way a fortress sits upon its hill with the particular confidence of something built to last. I wanted that warmth of late afternoon stone, that ochre and sienna glow that makes old masonry look almost alive. I wanted it to feel prosperous. Safe. Untroubled….That feeling of false safety is where the painting’s real subject announced itself.
Convergence
The ghost came next, rising from the lower left, from the water. She was always going to be there. I cannot entirely explain her except to say that certain paintings require a witness, and she is that witness, patient, translucent, unhurried. She has been waiting longer than the castle has stood.
The storm was already building in the upper right. The mountains there carry that particular grey-blue of approaching weather, and the clouds push down toward the valley with no great urgency, which makes them more ominous rather than less. Urgency can be outrun. That slow, indifferent gathering cannot.
Between the ghost and the storm, the castle sits in its afternoon light, entirely unaware. The blue sky above it still looks like an ordinary day. That is the heart of the matter. The swans were the last element to fully resolve, and I am most pleased with them. The large bird in the foreground demanded honesty, the exact orange-red of the bill, the weight of the body on the water. Swans have carried enormous symbolic weight across European tradition for a very long time, and I wanted these birds to earn their place in that company rather than merely decorate the foreground. They are witnesses too, though of a different order than the ghost. They are simply living their lives, indifferent to the drama gathering above them, which strikes me as true to how the world actually works.
My partner named the painting. She looked at it and said convergence, and that was the end of the matter. She saw immediately what I had been working toward, the ghost, the storm, and the castle all moving toward the same moment of reckoning along their separate paths. The regent in that tower, whoever he may be, has a buried past. The painting knows this even if he does not.
If I’m asked what tradition this work belongs to. I would say it belongs to the tradition of moral landscape, the idea, running from the Northern European painters through the Romantics, that the natural world is not merely scenery. It reflects. It remembers. It converges.
There’s a certain honesty in the way cats ruin holidays. The garland becomes prey, the lights become quarry, and somewhere in the middle of the night, a crash signals that festive order has finally met its natural predator. R. M.’s Chaos Killed Christmas doesn’t merely depict that moment, it canonizes it.
Chaos
Here, the feline doesn’t perch guiltily beside the wreckage, but reigns within it. The ornament becomes both culprit and reliquary, reflecting the fallen tree like a battlefield trophy. The cat’s eyes, impossibly green, hold the quiet triumph of a creature who has done exactly what he meant to do. Around him, R. M. swirls the background into cosmic curls of blue and violet, as if the wallpaper is the universe itself spun in bemused orbit around this household apocalypse.
The work hums with that peculiar domestic truth: that perfection is brittle, and the best memories often begin with disaster. In the shimmer of acrylic, in the reflections of a toppled ornament, Chaos Killed Christmas captures what every pet owner secretly knows, order is fragile, and joy is what comes clawing through it.
