This painting was a conjunction of the thought of Norman Rockwell meets a family of demons on vacation.
The idea came about watching a lake in the morning at an RV park in Ohio.
You can see the swimming platform right behind the kraken in the painting.
The balance of good verses evil is an old tale in art. This digital art was inspired by earlier work I did in 2020-ish, but centers on the question of what happens when the scales tip, the ideal evaporates, and the cogs begin to question their place in the machine. A I’ve said, there is … Read more
Pseudo- fan art for you this morning. This was based on the character Christine, played by Margaret Clunie in the campy period (think 1940’s noir style) Horror movie “Here Comes Hell.” She and her friends hold a seance and unwittingly unlock a gateway to hell. No spoilers except she’s looking for an impromptu weapon in the fireplace, weighs the poker for the coming combat, but then see’s Excalibur hidden in the flue. EXCALIBUR! Anyway, about the digital painting. It’s set up as a typical portrait of the 1940’s with starlet holding a cigarette in one of those thingy’s. She’s looking at the rising sun after spending all night combatting evil. Again, no spoilers – I didn’t want to base it fully on the movie, because it’s always the inginue that is the focus of the film – she plays the jaded, jealous sister. So, surviving a night of horror, with some artistic license in dress, hair, sword, room, basically everything but the idea of a 1940’s debutante leaning on a sword. Flowers tomorrow! … or the next time I do art 🙂
I had an entire long post ready to go but thanks to an app crash, I’ll give you the highlights.
I wasn’t going to share this painting. I didn’t think it worthy, but people started to like it, so, here we are.
There’s two themes going on here. First, there’s a piece of Papayrus at Harvard (this is not the Dan Brown / Da Vinci Code angle) that has a line where Jesus calls Mary Magdalene “my Wife”. Imagine that? Going from fallen prostitute to the equal (or better than, in the words of Paul) of Jesus. The documentary I watched “The Gospel of Mary“, started the ball rolling on this idea. I was originally going to paint just her.
As an aside, and from a historical perspective since I’m not religious (there’s a long story involving an ex-wife that caused me to be like the hit R.E.M song with God), I’m fascinated by what got in the Bible, what got left out (Gnosticism, Council of Nicea, etc.), and the power-plays that took place to put down Mary (labeling her a prostitute). So painting this had a lot to do with egalité, as the French would say.
Next I came across a Mark Twain quote that made me pause:
“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
I thought, “who better to bring the word of God to the first and last sinner?” So I had Mary confronting the great vvrym and closing the loop on this Christianity thing – a denouement of sorts, but without the 80’s soundtrack.
The painting had a working title of “Prom Dress Mary and the Pompadour (fixed) Dragon“. That title should explain why I wasn’t going to post it at first. Anyway, here it is.