Kreative Forge

Blossoming Dream

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A purple unicorn resting under pink blossom trees with a moonlit sky in the background.

Beneath a swollen moon, in a grove where the cherry trees loose their blossoms like slow snow, a violet unicorn keeps her repose. She has folded her legs beneath her in the manner of a creature wholly at ease, and she turns her gaze outward past the edge of the world, as though attending to some music the rest of us cannot hear. This is Blossoming Dream, and into one still image it gathers three of the oldest emblems the imagination has kept: the horned beast of purity, the flowering tree of the passing season, and the moon that presides over them both.

Each of these has a long pedigree. Set side by side upon a single canvas, they answer one another in a way that rewards a slower kind of looking. What follows traces the three threads back toward their sources, and shows why they were always meant to be woven together.

The beast older than the bestiaries

The unicorn did not begin in fairy tales. Its earliest surviving description in the West comes from the Greek physician Ctesias of Cnidus, who in the fourth century before our era set down an account of a swift, single-horned “wild ass of India” in his Indica. Ctesias had served as court physician in Persia, and his report, embroidered though it surely was by the campfire testimony of travellers, gave Europe a beast it would keep for two thousand years. Pliny the Elder later fixed the name monoceros upon the creature in his Natural History, and from those classical seeds the whole later flowering grew.

It was the Physiologus, an early Christian book of beasts and their meanings, that gave the unicorn its most enduring story: the fierce animal, untakeable by force, grows gentle in the presence of a maiden and lays its head in her lap, whereupon the hunters close in. The medieval mind read this at once as allegory, the unicorn standing for Christ and the maiden for the Virgin, and so the beast passed into the bestiaries, the cathedrals, and the great woven cycles of the late Middle Ages. Two of those cycles survive as marvels: the seven hangings of the Hunt of the Unicorn at the Met Cloisters, woven around 1500, and the six panels of The Lady and the Unicorn at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. Curiously, the cherry tree that presides over Blossoming Dream has an old kinship with these works. Among the hundred and more plant species identified in the Cloisters tapestries, a flowering cherry stands prominently behind the hunters as they enter the wood.

The horn itself carried a lore apart from the beast. A powder ground from it, the alicorn, was believed to sweat in the presence of poison and to purify tainted water, and so kings paid the price of a small estate for a length of it. Most of these treasures were the spiraled tusks of the narwhal, the small Arctic whale whose ivory tooth, sold across a credulous continent, sustained the legend long after any traveller had claimed to see the animal alive. The connoisseur of unicorns who wishes to go to the root of the matter can do no better than Odell Shepard’s The Lore of the Unicorn, first published in 1930 and still the most graceful survey of the whole tradition.

The unicorn and the moon

Shepard is worth pausing over, for it is he who drew out the thread that binds the unicorn to the moon above her in this painting. In the old symbolic pairings the unicorn was set against the lion, and where the tawny lion stood for the sun, the white unicorn was read as the moon: the one solar, masculine, and blazing; the other lunar, feminine, and cool. The very whiteness of the creature carries the argument, for white and silver were the colours of the moon in the language of the alchemists, colours of receptivity, intuition, and the untainted mind. When lion and unicorn appear together, the symbolists spoke of the coniunctio, the alchemical marriage in which the solar and lunar principles are reconciled and made one.

The connection runs deeper than metaphor. When the arms of the Le Viste family, who commissioned the Cluny tapestries, were deciphered, the heralds found three silver crescent moons upon a band of blue. The moon was woven into the unicorn’s story from the first, quite literally, in silver thread. To place a unicorn beneath a full moon, then, is to return her to her proper heaven. She is a lunar animal come home to the light that made her, and the painter has rendered that moon not as a cold disc but as a living, swirling presence, ringed in a halo of pale fire, the true sovereign of the scene.

The cherry tree and the doctrine of the passing hour

The blossoms falling through the moonlight bring the third and gentlest of the old traditions. The Japanese practice of hanami, the viewing of flowers, reaches back more than twelve centuries. It began in the Nara period, when the aristocracy gathered to admire the plum, and shifted during the Heian period toward the cherry, whose blooming the Emperor Saga made the occasion of formal feasts of poetry and music at the court in Kyoto. From those gatherings grew a whole aesthetic of the cherry blossom that has shaped Japanese art and feeling ever since.

At its centre lies the idea the scholars call mono no aware, the tender awareness of the passing of things. The cherry is beloved precisely because it does not last. It opens all at once in a great pale cloud and falls within a handful of days, and in that brief and brilliant career the beholder reads the whole shape of a life. The eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga held that the entire task of art was to give voice to this feeling. The warrior class took the blossom for their own emblem for the same reason, seeing in the petal that falls at the height of its beauty a mirror of a life meant to be brief and honourable. The falling petal is the doctrine made visible: loveliness and mortality bound in the same slow descent.

Where the three meet

Set these three together and a single quiet argument emerges. The moon dies to a thread and is reborn, month upon month, the oldest teacher of the truth that endings are only turnings. The blossom falls so that the tree may flower again. And the unicorn, alone among the beasts, is the deathless one, the creature glimpsed only by the pure and never truly taken, a figure of what does not pass at all.

In Blossoming Dream these meet without strain. The unicorn reclines in the very rain of falling petals, the undying amid the dying, and over both presides the moon that reconciles the two. It is a picture of rest inside the turning of things, of the eternal keeping company with the transient and finding it beautiful. Readers who follow such currents will recognise the temper of the Codex of the Outer Realms, whose whole concern is the contemplative reading of ancient symbols; the painting speaks the same language in colour that the Codex speaks in prose.

About the painting

Blossoming Dream is an original acrylic painting on canvas by Rob Medley, worked in a palette of deep violet, moonlit blue, and blossom pink. It is one of a body of original fantasy and visionary paintings offered through Kreative Forge, the independent studio of Rob Medley, and it may be seen in person at the Renaissance and medieval faires where the studio keeps its booth through the season.

The painting is available for purchase. Enquiries, prices, and a fuller gallery of original paintings are all a short journey away. Those who would keep a little of the moonlit grove upon their own wall are warmly invited to write.

Firefly Redux

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I channeled Leo Villarreal when I originally did this back in 2015. Over shows it received some damage, so I spent today putting it back together. It will be at my booth for the Great Lakes Medieval Faire. It needs a home. Here are some repair process pictures.

One of the frames came loose. As you can see from the next one, I painted both sides of the canvas, much like I did for “Artistic Triage.”

Back-side above, front below.

You can’t really see it here but I use blue, green, and purple to achieve the presence of all colors… or is it the absence?

Taken from above on my bed. The painting is 30×40 (I think). She’s big.

Here’s where Villarreal comes in. The painting lights up. It’s electric USB so there needs to be an outlet nearby.

It’s also 3D. Admittedly, modern art was a phase for me, I found out it wasn’t my jam, so there’s only 2-3 pieces in that category.

View from the bottom. The fireflies are hanging out over the grass.

Available for purchase.

String theory, quantum entanglement, and the geometry of nothing.

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Three serious answers to a question that should not have an answer.

A vibrant painting depicts two silhouetted figures standing on a hill, facing a colorful sky. A radiant sunset with warm hues of red, orange, and yellow dominates the background, with swirling clouds and green hills framing the scene.
Finale

A Heresy in Good Standing

I recently watched a video in which a physicist says, with the calm of a man reading a grocery list, that spacetime is probably not fundamental. The stage on which everything happens turns out to be a painted backdrop. The floor is not the floor.

The reasonable reaction is to assume the speaker has been at the edibles. Spacetime is the one thing we never doubt. Distance feels real because you can stub your toe on it. Time feels real because it keeps stealing your afternoons. Telling a person that these are emergent, downstream, secondary, sounds like telling them that water is, on reflection, optional.

And yet this is now close to the mainstream opinion among the people who do the hard arithmetic. The question that occupies the field is no longer whether spacetime is fundamental. It is what spacetime emerges from. Three programs lead, and they are worth knowing, because each one quietly dismantles an assumption you have carried since childhood. (Full disclosure before we start. I paint pictures and write books for a living, and am a guest in the house of physics, wiping my feet at the door.)

The Universe as a Web of Knowing

The first answer goes by an unlovely name, the holographic principle, and it begins with an observation about information. Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind noticed in the early nineties that the amount of information you can pack into a region of space scales with the area of its surface, rather than the volume inside. Reality keeps its books on the boundary, like a shop that records sales at the door and ignores the stockroom.

In 1997 Juan Maldacena turned the metaphor into mathematics. He showed that a universe with gravity can be perfectly described by a quantum theory living on its lower-dimensional edge, with no gravity in the description at all. Two pictures, one truth. The interior and its boundary say the same thing in different alphabets.

Then came the sentence that should keep you up at night. In 2010 Mark Van Raamsdonk asked what happens if you take the boundary theory and slowly reduce the quantum entanglement between its two halves. The answer, worked out in the equations, is that the interior geometry stretches, thins, and finally tears. Remove the correlation, and the distance grows. Cut it entirely, and the two regions no longer share a spacetime to be far apart in.

Distance is a measure of how much two things fail to know each other.

Shinsei Ryu and Tadashi Takayanagi sharpened this, linking the area of a surface to the entropy of entanglement across it. Maldacena and Susskind pushed it further with a conjecture of almost indecent elegance, that a wormhole joining two black holes and a pair of entangled particles might be the very same thing, glimpsed from two angles. The slogan the field adopted, borrowing from John Wheeler, is “it from qubit.” Geometry is not the stage. Geometry is the running tally of relationships, and where the relationships are dense the cosmos feels near, and where they thin it feels far.

One honest caution, since this essay would like to survive a skeptic. The exact version of this duality lives in a universe shaped differently from ours, curved the wrong way, and nobody has yet made the dictionary work cleanly for the expanding cosmos we actually inhabit. The principle is firm. The application to home is unfinished business.

A surreal painting depicts a woman with an intense expression in the foreground. The road behind her dramatically stretches into the distance, flanked by lush green trees. Three figures, two standing and one crouching, are visible on the road, with a vibrant, cloudy sky above.
The Path

The Shape Before the Story

The second answer is stranger, and it arrives wearing a name that sounds like a rejected Transformer, the amplituhedron. In 2013 Nima Arkani-Hamed and Jaroslav Trnka found that certain calculations of how particles interact, calculations that normally crawl through pages of spacetime bookkeeping, can be done instead by computing the volume of a single geometric object. This object lives in an abstract mathematical space. It contains no time. It contains no notion of “here” and “there.” It is just a shape.

Here is the part that rearranges the furniture in your skull. The familiar rules, that causes precede effects locally, that probabilities behave themselves, do not get fed into the shape as assumptions. They come out of it, as consequences of the shape’s geometry. Locality and time look less like the bedrock of reality and more like the way a certain crystal happens to catch the light.

The universe may be a shape before it is ever a story.

If that is right, then time is not a river we are floating down. Time is how the shape appears when you are standing inside it, the same way a cathedral seems to unfold corridor by corridor only because you cannot occupy all of it at once. The caveat, again offered freely, is that this machinery currently works for an idealized theory, a clean cousin of the real thing. The dirty, glorious Standard Model of our world has not yet been folded into a polytope. Still, the proof of principle stands, and it is humbling. A shape can dream a spacetime.

The Order Underneath the Smoothness

The third answer is the oldest and the most stubborn, and it says the smoothness is a lie of scale. Look closely enough and spacetime is grainy, made of discrete pieces, the way a photograph dissolves into dots when you press your nose to it.

Causal set theory, proposed in 1987 by Bombelli, Lee, Meyer, and Sorkin, takes this to its austere conclusion. Reality at bottom is a discrete set of events with nothing but a notion of before and after connecting them. Rafael Sorkin compressed the entire program into a phrase fit for carving over a doorway, “order plus number equals geometry.” Give the universe a list of which events come before which, count them, and space and time precipitate out like salt from a drying sea.

Loop quantum gravity, descended from Roger Penrose’s spin networks and carried forward by Carlo Rovelli and Lee Smolin, quantizes the fabric directly. Area and volume come in smallest possible units, and what we call space is a vast web of relations, a network whose nodes do not sit anywhere because the network is the where. The matrix models of the late nineties grow dimensions out of the arithmetic of large grids of numbers. Wheeler dreamed of all this in advance and gave it a name, pregeometry, law without law, the hope that geometry bubbles up from something logically prior to it.

The common confession across this family is plain. Relation comes first. Extension is the echo. The “where” and the “when” are tidy summaries we drape over a churning lattice of priority and connection.

What the Three Have in Common

Notice the family resemblance. Entanglement weaves space from correlation. The amplituhedron derives space from a timeless shape. The discrete models grow space from raw order. Three different alphabets, one sentence underneath them all.

Reality is relationship first and scenery second.

The thing we trusted most, the empty stage, turns out to be the most derivative thing in the building. The void is doing the work. It was always doing the work. The geometry we mistook for the floor is the residue of countless tiny relations, correlations, orderings, foldings, each one referring to the others, the whole structure curling back to define itself with no outside to lean on.

This is recursion in the exact sense, a system that produces its own ground by referring to itself across scales. And it is precisely the territory my books have been mapping, in a different and older language, for five volumes.

A surreal painting features a massive blue wave crashing towards an island with a tree and a house. Above, a red, spiral-like cloud swirls in a dark night sky dotted with stars. The vibrant colors and fantastical elements create a dreamlike atmosphere.
Dimensions of Life

The Codex of the Outer Realms

The Codex of the Outer Realms treats the so-called outer gods of public-domain weird fiction not as monsters under the bed, but as contemplative instruments, frameworks for thinking about exactly the questions the physicists are now forced to ask. The parallels are uncomfortably tidy.

Chaos Unveiled reads Azathoth as the blind computation beneath appearance, the substrate that generates structure without intending any of it. That is the entanglement and the matrix churn, mindless, ceaseless, and somehow the author of every geometry. The Screaming Cipher of Nyarlathotep takes information and encoding as its subject, which is the holographic confession in liturgical dress, the message written on the boundary that the interior only thinks it authored. The Gate That Opens Into Itself places Yog-Sothoth at the threshold that is coextensive with all thresholds, relation without location, which is the amplituhedron’s timeless totality wearing a stranger mask. The Pallid Doctrine of Hastur works through self-similarity and law understood as turbulence slowed, the fractal order that the discrete theories find when they look beneath the smooth. And The Heretical Shape of the Universe, the convergence volume, makes the claim outright. The cosmos has a shape prior to its story, and the shape refers to itself, endlessly, with no edge to stand outside of.

None of this is an attempt to dress physics in robes and call it scripture. The physics stands on its own and owes the books nothing. The point runs the other direction. A contemplative tradition built honestly on real esoteric sources, Pseudo-Dionysius and the apophatic mystics, Ibn Arabi, the Kabbalists, the Kashmir Shaivites, kept arriving at the same austere intuition that the equations are now circling. That the ground is not solid. That the one is prior to the many. That awareness aware of its own awareness is the closest the language gets.

The void was never empty, it only looked empty to creatures who mistook the backdrop for the bedrock. The floor is not the floor. Walk carefully. The whole cathedral is humming, and it has been humming the entire time, waiting for someone to press an ear to the stone and listen for the order underneath.

Select Sources

‘t Hooft, Gerard. “Dimensional Reduction in Quantum Gravity.” 1993.
Susskind, Leonard. “The World as a Hologram.” Journal of Mathematical Physics, 1995.
Maldacena, Juan. “The Large N Limit of Superconformal Field Theories and Supergravity.” 1997.
Ryu, Shinsei, and Tadashi Takayanagi. “Holographic Derivation of Entanglement Entropy from AdS/CFT.” 2006.
Van Raamsdonk, Mark. “Building Up Spacetime with Quantum Entanglement.” 2010.
Maldacena, Juan, and Leonard Susskind. “Cool Horizons for Entangled Black Holes.” 2013.
Arkani-Hamed, Nima, and Jaroslav Trnka. “The Amplituhedron.” 2013.
Bombelli, Luca, Joohan Lee, David Meyer, and Rafael Sorkin. “Space-Time as a Causal Set.” Physical Review Letters, 1987.
Rovelli, Carlo, and Lee Smolin. “Discreteness of Area and Volume in Quantum Gravity.” 1995.
Banks, Tom, Willy Fischler, Stephen Shenker, and Leonard Susskind. “M Theory as a Matrix Model: A Conjecture.” 1997.
Wheeler, John Archibald. “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links.” 1990.
Penrose, Roger. “Angular Momentum: An Approach to Combinatorial Space-Time.” 1971.
Smolin, Lee. Time Reborn. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Woman with a Dark Heart

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There exists in the trade a quiet expectation, rarely spoken yet universally understood, that a painter who finds a worthy subject will return to it some three to five times before its interest is exhausted. Monet gave us his cathedrals at Rouen, the same stone façade rendered through the shifting hours until the architecture dissolved into pure atmosphere. Thiebaud spent a long career arranging pastries upon their counters, a single glazed donut becoming a meditation on light, pigment, and the American appetite. The logic is sound. A familiar form permits the hand to wander, freed from the labor of invention, attending instead to the subtleties of touch and tone.

A surreal painting featuring a naked woman with red hair, seated at a table with a green cloth. She holds a hand up, surrounded by flowing tentacles. In the background, a window lets in light, and a painting of a woman with a pearl earring is visible on the wall. The scene includes various objects like candles and an artifact on the table.
Woman with a Dark Heart, Rob Medley

A difficulty presents itself, however, when the chosen subject possesses no form to begin with.
The shoggoth was H.P. Lovecraft’s answer to a question few thinkers care to pose: what shape does horror take when shape itself has become the enemy? In the frozen record of At the Mountains of Madness, these creatures appear as heaving masses of black, iridescent protoplasm, bred by the Elder Things as beasts of burden and stripped of any fixed anatomy. Eyes form upon the surface and sink again. Limbs rise, perform their labor, and are reabsorbed. The thing is a viscous congeries of bubbles that throws up whatever organ the moment demands, then forgets it ever held one. To render such a creature is to paint the refusal of permanence, a study in the impossibility of study.

So one returns to the problem of the series. Tea and Tentacles stood as the first of these shoggoth studies, painted before an audience at the Akron Zoo Renaissance Festival, where the creature wore an almost domestic charm. Woman with a Dark Heart is the second. A third waits in the wings, concept defined, awaiting the horror of being brought to life. Three studies of a thing that cannot hold its own outline for the span of a heartbeat, the proposition borders on the absurd, which is precisely why it merits the attempt.

The composition descends from Johannes Vermeer, who remains the first name in my private canon, with Bob Ross holding second place and Larry Elmore the third. An honorable mention belongs to Han van Meegeren, the gutsy Dutchman whose teachers and critics pronounced him a mere imitator, a hand without an idea of its own. He answered that verdict with the longest insult in the history of the trade. Laying his own name aside, he painted Vermeers so persuasive that the foremost connoisseurs of the age wept over them as lost masterpieces, and one such forgery he sold to Hermann Göring himself, taking the Reichsmarschall’s looted fortune and leaving the man a worthless canvas for his trouble. The war ended, and that sale earned him a charge of collaboration grave enough to cost a man his life. To save his neck he confessed the grander crime, that the prized “Vermeer” had come from his own brush, and he proved it by painting another under guard while the prosecutors looked on. Half the country toasted the rogue who had swindled a Nazi. The older Dutch, who had endured the occupation in earnest, hold a colder view, and count him a collaborator who grew fat while his neighbors went hungry. A scoundrel, perhaps, though a scoundrel with nerve, and nerve is the rarest pigment on any palette.

The particular ancestor here is the Woman Holding a Balance, painted around 1664 and now resident at the National Gallery in Washington. In that quiet interior a woman stands at a window, an empty scale poised between her fingers, while behind her hangs a painting of the Last Judgment. The reading offered by generations of scholars concerns the weighing of souls, the measure of a life set against eternity, temperance triumphant over the pearls and gold strewn across her table.

A woman in a blue cloak and white headscarf stands beside a table, holding scales with a serene expression, surrounded by luxurious objects and an ornate painting in a dimly lit room.
Woman Holding A Balance, Johannes Vermeer


That theme of the weighed soul reaches back far older than the Dutch Republic. The Egyptians knew it as the psychostasia, the ceremony described in the Book of the Dead, wherein the heart of the deceased was set upon the scale against the feather of Ma’at. A heart grown heavy with wrongdoing tipped the balance, and the devourer waited beneath the beam to consume whatever soul had failed. The title of this canvas takes its meaning there. A dark heart is a heavy heart, and a heavy heart does not balance.

Where Vermeer placed the Last Judgment, this version sets a Solomonic seal in red, the old grimoire geometry that claimed to bind spirits and command the unseen. The window survives, its leaded grid admitting the same disciplined light that the Delft master guarded so jealously. A smaller framed picture hangs within the larger scene, and the face caught in its gold border is the Girl with a Pearl Earring herself, lifted from the Mauritshuis, which I visited early in 2026, and pressed into service here, a figure in blue and a single luminous pearl quoted in homage to Vermeer’s own habit of setting paintings inside paintings. The balance remains. The heart, however, has gone to shadow, and the formless thing has come in through the dark.

A close-up portrait of a girl wearing a blue and yellow turban, with a pearl earring, set against a dark background.
Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer

This one resisted the hand for a long while, and the canvas carries the evidence of that struggle beneath its final coat. Modern imaging has taught us a great deal about Vermeer’s own changes of mind, for technical study has shown that he reworked his pictures more than once, adjusting the composition beneath the visible surface until the meaning satisfied him. Should anyone ever pass this newer canvas beneath a similar lamp, the scan would disclose a second figure, complete, standing nearer the left edge, and over it a moment of genuine doubt. The shoggoth now occupies that ground. A failed form lies buried under the one creature in all of literature that exists to devour form. The accident proved more honest than any plan.

Woman with a Dark Heart. Acrylic on canvas, 24 by 40 inches. $500. The second of the shoggoth studies.
The void was never empty. Find the path within.

Tea and Tentacles

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The protagonist of this piece, if such a thing can be called a protagonist, is a shoggoth at his leisure. He has dressed for the occasion. A black silk topper sits upon the upper mass of him, a monocle is fixed to more than one of the more discerning eyes, and a pocket watch hangs by its chain from a tentacle that has just consulted the hour. It is teatime. The cup waits upon the cushion of the settee. Another tentacle clutches a slim volume, which any reader of Lovecraft should relate to at a glance: At the Mountains of Madness. The shoggoth, evidently, is reading about himself.

The thought animating the painting is what I would describe as post-industrial horror. The horror is not in the creature itself, which is rendered almost companionable. The horror lies in the smoothness with which the cosmic and the domestic have come to terms. The Outside has been invited in, has accepted a cup of tea, and has begun catching up on its correspondence. The wallpaper does not flinch. Nothing in the room registers an objection. That, more than any tentacle, is the unsettling part.

Painted during the Renaissance Festival weekend at the Akron Zoo, with all the cheerful clamor of the event going on around me. There is something fitting in that, I think. A shoggoth produced amid the noise of festival is a shoggoth properly placed.

Acrylic on Canvas, 18×24. Available.

A surreal painting depicting a creature with a mass of tentacles and multiple eyes, wearing a top hat, seated in a vintage chair against a patterned background.

Wisdom

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The owl looks back. That, in the end, is the whole of the painting. Another of a month-long trifecta that is coming to fruition this week.

I had set out to render the bird in something other than the customary brown and umber. Wisdom, in the older mythologies, keeps strange company. She walks the night with Athena, peers from the shoulder of Minerva, hunts among the Egyptian dead. None of that ground is quiet. None of it is soft. So I reached instead for cobalt and violet, for the colours one finds in the small hours when the eye begins to invent what the dark refuses to provide.

A vibrant painting of an owl's face, featuring large, hypnotic yellow eyes and a colorful abstract background in shades of blue and purple.

The oval canvas was a deliberate cheek. Portraiture in the old style insisted upon the oval for saints, mothers, and minor aristocrats. I rather liked the idea of an owl looking out from the frame once reserved for one’s great-aunt.

The eyes did most of the labour. I worked them in successive glazes of cadmium and ochre, then pressed the highlights in with the smallest brush I owned, the one I keep meaning to replace and never do. An owl’s eyes occupy almost a third of its skull. The painter who shortchanges them is painting something else entirely.

The beak, hooked and serious, settles the matter. There is no kindness in an owl. There is only attention. Wisdom, I suspect, looks much the same.

Acrylic on oval canvas. Available through Kreative Forge.

Reflections

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The moon gives light borrowed from the sun. Stand long enough beside still water on a clear night and one discovers the water gives that light back again, twice removed from its source and stranger for the journey. Reflection began with that small astonishment.

The work is acrylic on canvas, eighteen by twenty inches, executed in traditional brush and airbrush together. The lunar disc was laid in with the moon’s actual palette: cool greys of the highlands, iron-tinged browns of the maria, the faint warmth where regolith meets the observing eye. Over those true colors went a wash of reflected atmospheric light, the way she appears to anyone who has stood beneath her on a humid evening, haloed and softened by the air through which she is seen.

An artistic depiction of a large full moon illuminating a dark sky, with fluffy clouds and subtle stars, reflecting on a calm body of water surrounded by lush trees.

Below the treeline, the water carries her likeness. Look closely. Her image there is threefold.

The threefold moon is no recent invention. Hesiod gave Hecate three faces at the crossroads of the world. The Romans honored Diana Trivia where three paths met. Apuleius set into the mouth of Isis the great speech of self-naming, the silver crescent her chief crown. The triplicity of the lunar phase, waxing through full to waning, has been read by serious students of comparative religion as a single grammar spoken in many tongues.

Robert Graves drew these threads together in The White Goddess (1948), proposing that the threefold moon describes the great arc of feminine becoming: maiden in the waxing crescent, mother in the full disc, elder in the waning sliver. One need not concede the whole of his argument to feel the truth of the figure. The phases are observable. Their correspondence to the seasons of a life requires only that one has lived a little.

So the painting hides nothing. The single moon above is the body of the night sky. The three moons below are her phases gathered into one still water, and that water is the contemplative mind, which sees what the eye has seen and recognizes the pattern beneath the pattern.

There is a reason the mirror has always stood for the inner eye. What the world hands us in its turning, the mind hands back as image. Reflection in this older sense is the foundational act of contemplative practice. To stand at the edge of a dark lake and see the moon doubled is to be reminded that the world is twice given: once in fact, once in the silence behind the eye.

The water in the painting is calm enough to receive her, troubled enough to render her in motion. The triple reflection wavers a little. So does the soul that beholds her.

Reflection is offered to anyone who finds in such things a quiet companion to long thought. She asks nothing of the wall she hangs upon. The moon never has.

Acrylic on canvas, 18 × 20 inches. Original painting by Rob Medley. Available; inquiries welcome.

The Human Stain

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This painting is about the end, when humanity’s hubris angers the universe to the point where it’s not worth saving anymore. I used a liminal hallway, half symbolic of the damage we’ve done as a species to our home on this island among the blackness of space/time, the other half symbolizing an escape of the innocent. The angel, well, she’s taking a last look around before heading out for the final time.

A close-up of an artistic depiction of an angel with blonde hair and wings, set against a dark background.

The picture was hard to get. Light pollution was extremely annoying in it’s capture. I have to figure out how to get a better one. But for now, this is what we have. 30×40, acrylic on canvas.

A dark, atmospheric painting featuring a figure with angelic wings standing in front of an exit door, surrounded by a dimly lit corridor with scattered debris and a tree, evoking a sense of mystery and introspection.

The Dance

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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.

Acrylic on canvas, 30 × 40 inches

The Unsalvageable

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Original acrylic painting depicting a tall ship with blue-violet furled sails being seized by deep crimson kraken tentacles, set within a nautical compass rose against a vivid vermillion background, with dark churning seas below — "The Unsalvageable" by Rob Medley, Kreative Forge.

The Unsalvageable — Acrylic on Canvas 18″x24″

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.

An artistic depiction of a ship surrounded by stylized octopus tentacles, with a vibrant orange background and a compass-like design.

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.
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Pop Psychopomp

by

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.

An artistic depiction of Anubis, featuring stylized illustrations of a black jackal-headed figure in various poses, adorned with blue and gold accents, along with a colorful scarab beetle and a falcon motif in the background.
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,