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,
