Yukio Mishima’s favourite saint. Inspired by recent trip to boy bar and by Takato Yamamoto. Ink on watercolour paper, quick digital colour. No model except for the right hand, which I think I’ve used in three pictures now! I’ve been drawing this with a fine-nib steel pen, which doesn’t like the rough paper, so the lineart is crap (not that my penwork is ever very good). When I’ve finished the ink and digital colour I’ll probably try painting it for real, which should result in a nice mess .

I’m not sure what to do with the halo. My first plan was to fill it with flowers, but now I think that might look twee. So maybe butterflies and moths (and a caterpillar or two).

Something that I think wants to be an Arthur Rackham tree has started to take root in the background, telling me it wants to be adorned with skulls, devil faces, lizards and other goodies. Guess I’ll be a while on this one…

I’ve got too many pictures from Nepal and not enough will to organise them at the moment, but here’s one as a placeholder. It’s a decoration on a strut under a temple roof. It’s true, God gave rock and roll to you! (And furry sex too, if you look below.)

I’m piling up tabs full of eye candy and eye poison and curios, and Firefox is getting slow. Time to drop them here. (Forget bookmarks, my bookmarks are the black hole of Calcutta.)

Homunculus, a short movie by Hydra — “Homunculus is a dark and twisted fable of spontaneous generation and untrammeled id. Taking its title from the Latin word for “Little Human”, the piece is an associative mashup between the two concepts behind the word: The first being middle-age alchemical beliefs that “little men” could be spontaneous generated from dead or decaying matter. The second being Carl Jung’s usage as a personification of pure id.” Little furry men emerging from the decay of a vanitas painting and…but I won’t spoil it.

A crochet coral reef that illustrates hyperbolic space (as does coral, and sea slugs and lettuce; but apparently no one knew what hyperbolic space might look like until mathematician Daina Taimina had the idea of crocheting it). One of the originators of the reef, Margaret Wertheim, talks about the project and its mathematics here. (As one of the commentators points out, she might not be correct in saying that “the most famous postulate in all of mathematics has been proven wrong.” But I think that’s a minor quibble in the overall awesomeness of crocheting hyperbolic coral.)

A kinda-sphinxy siren by Antony Micallef. I love both the image itself and the painting technique.

The body bakery of Kittiwat Unarrom, a Thai artist who makes hyperrealistic sculptures of rotten dead body parts out of bread. All edible!

Carmen Lozar’s glass art. Her flameworked, painted pieces are gorgeous. Although the website calls them “diminutive celebrations of the everyday”, they also celebrate the imaginary. She also makes glass couture — glass garments with nobody (or invisible bodies) inside them.

Weird illustrations by Léonard Sarluis for Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension (1912) by Gaston de Pawlowski. I dig the things on the stairs.

Nature is awesome…

Transparent sea cucumber Enypniastes, via oceanleadership.org

Eny swimming

And while I’m doing pretties, a dreamlike flower with hummingbirds by Martin Johnson Heade.

And for the cute, a sea pig…

And for the weird… as Stu said, these people obviously aren’t marine biologists.

Oh, my, only four days into the year and already I’ve found (via Random Index) a devilish enabler of procrastination — Outrepart, a site featuring 100 “astounding images from everywhere”, updated hourly, with links.

A minute there led to a couple of hours looking at, amongst other things –
A regal penis
An ithyphallic Jesus (c.1525)
Crappy taxidermy
Japanese surgical illustrations
The strange and luscious art of Madeline von Foerster
The strange and luscious art of John Brophy
Moose
Undream the Echoes, a blog of macabre and unsettling things
Rob Evans, whose eerie paintings often show strangeness occurring in liminal places between the home and the outdoors, or the domestic and the wild.
A haunting abstract sculpture or installation by Harm van den Dorpel (all troubling and seductive latency)
Captain Jeff and the Squeeze Box, from Curious Pages (recommended inappropriate books for kids)
And MY ALLIGATOR MAN-GOD-THING.

And again from Random Index, the surreal drawings of Walter Schnackenberg.

Well, I guess it’s better than looking at porn or playing Bejeweled.

When I looked at this c.1916 picture of Elasmotherium, my first thought was, “Fuck, it’s a really-truly unicorn!” (More recent pictures look more like woolly rhinos.)

The artist, Heinrich Harder, made a lot of pictures of prehistoric animals. Arsinoitherium had a particularly badass head, but as a mostly aquatic swamp dweller it can’t be a candidate, rather to my regret.

Elasmotherium may have survived into historic times. 10th century traveller and writer Ibn Fadlan describes an animal that matches Elasmotherium’s description, and gives this colourful account of its behaviour: “Whenever it sees a rider, it approaches and if the rider has a fast horse, the horse tries to escape by running fast, and if the beast overtakes them, it picks the rider out of the saddle with its horn, and tosses him in the air, and meets him with the point of the horn, and continues doing so until the rider dies. But it will not harm or hurt the horse in any way or manner.”

Glyptodon and Doedicurus match up with Kirby’s suggestion of an armadillo. Glyptodon looks rather round and slippery for riding on, but Doedicurus had a dip behind a hump in the shell where a saddle might go — and the hump was possibly a fat store like a camel’s. It also had a wickedly spiked tail. I can imagine it surviving a bumpy fall, which would be a bonus.

Waiving the issue of domesticability (I think that already got waived with the centipede), it comes down to a bit of a dance between ambience and narrative ideas. While I want to avoid a big-lipped alligator moment, I’d also really like to have a beast that can do more than break its legs/neck when it falls.

No, I don’t know why I’m getting so obsessed with this. Wait, yes I do. I’m not sure how to write the scene after the one I’ve nearly finished, and research is the noblest form of procrastination. Gulp.

Collages by Alexis Anne Mackenzie. Like botanical illustrations from dreamland.

Extreme embroidery by Angelo Filomeno. More here.

Right, back to researching yurt construction, alpine steppe flora, and various ways of hurting yourself when you fall off a cliff. I’ll probably use about 0.01% of the info I find, but it’s sort of nice to have it all available so that I can choose details to include without wondering whether they’re realistic or not.

Some things I don’t worry about, like large-scale geography. My fantasy world, such as it is, is made of overlapping mythic territories, and geography and climate are subordinate to that, but I like each individual environment to work on its own terms. And I have to decide what tradeoffs to make between ambience and practicality — e.g. in this case a horse is being ridden where a yak or Bactrian camel might be more practical, but maybe I just want horse-ambience — though if I want the mountains to be alpine desert, like the Kunlun Mountains, which was my original idea, it might have to be a yak, since I think you’d have to carry a ton of feed on pack animals to get a horse through — or let your horse go hungry. Buy feed from herders? Maybe, but why are herders living in a poxy alpine desert when there’s probably a nice grassy steppe a couple of thousand feet down? All these things can be worked out, but they take a bit of thinking. And in a short story there isn’t room to go into detail. Maybe there are mining towns; there’d be feed for the pit ponies, but I want a somewhat otherworldly ambience, and mining towns don’t really go with that.  Or maybe they do? A donkey is technically an option, but the story starts at the winter solstice and has one other sort-of-though-not-really Christian element, and a main character riding on a donkey could underline the wrong idea. (Llamas and alpacas are right out; wrong ethnic feel and not strong enough to carry an adult rider very far, it looks like — even though llamas eat lichen, which would be perfect for the alpine desert.)

Get caught up in trivia, who me?

Edit: Having just looked at Alex’s blog, I feel inspired by the donestre. Carnivores can go quite a long time between meals. What sort of carnivore? Maybe an enormous giant centipede, which I guess comes to mind because I have a friend who has done battle with two pretty big ones in real life. But that really would change the ambience… and it needs to startle at a noise enough to throw its rider, and I somehow doubt a centipede would; but since the creature is in the realm of utter fantasy, it could. But is a domesticated giant centipede way cool, or way silly…? My inner child thinks it’s cool, of course… and it could actually be very useful in the first part of the story… I don’t know if I can resist. It might just have to be. Unless it really screws up the ambience.

I’m writing this through brain fog — got sick and had to take meds with anvilicious side effects, one being brain fog thick enough to compare with the effects of benzos, hash brownies, and being hit on the head with maybe not an anvil but at least a big stick.

Foggy brain has been working on the Gwynn story I’ve been wanting to write for a couple of years. Using PageFour, a tailored-to-prose-writers word processor with tabbed pages, I finally got something like a narrative organised. Thanks to Woodburner for recommending it. The tabs were helpful for working through plot options, as you can lay down different scenarios and sequences and jump between them without having to hunt around for that thing you write down two weeks ago. For someone like me who is not inherently good at story construction it was a big help. And Stu provided valuable consulting services. I think I finally got the feel of it away from cultural appropriation or twee pastiche of an Asian theme. It’s still quite Asiatic — yurts ahoy — but now with shades of another culture and a couple of ideas of my own, which makes me feel more comfortable with it. If it’s going in the collection I think it will work as a bookend to The Art of Dying. I hope so. I’ve written drafts of most of the scenes; I’m now up to the stage of writing them carefully enough that I’ll be able to see what has to be added. There’s a military backstory, but so far my attempts to write even part of it have come out like me channelling Robert E. Howard through a crappy radio, so I don’t know how much of that will end up in the mix — and the mix might not want much of it anyway. I’ll take refuge in the words of Gertrude Stein: “Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.”

Robert Holdstock, author of Mythago Wood and numerous other books and stories, died couple of days ago. He was one of those rare writers who are real enchanters. His work seemed to tap into ancient currents and bring strange old things to new, eerie life. The cause of death was an E.Coli infection — he was only 61. When someone relatively young dies of something random like that it can’t help but remind you of your own fragility and the possibility of life being cut unexpectedly short. The voice from beyond the grave only says one thing: pull your finger out. I’m trying to work on that.

Recent art finds:
Julie Heffernan
Nikki Pinder

Poetry:
I have a poem, When the Lamps are Lit, in Issue #19 of Electric Velocipede. One the same page are two terrific poems by Beth Langford. Both remind me of Gaston Bachelard’s idea of the animals inside us. The first line of Retired Shapeshifters, “We miss the animals we’ve been”, sums up, for me, a complex problem of human life, and one which receives little attention, because philosophy tends to think of human life and its defects only in human terms — whereas we are really Russian dolls, with inner animals going all the way back  to to the protozoan life in Langford’s second poem, My Past Lives. I’ve been looking for an answer to why I obsessively draw human figures with animal heads, and I think this is the answer. I miss the animals I’ve been.

British art student Sara Watson, 22, from Central Lancashire University, has painted a Skoda Fabia so that when viewed from a certain angle it appears to vanish into the parking lot where it sits. “I was experimenting with the whole concept of illusion but needed something a bit more physical to make a real impact,” Watson said. The work took three weeks and is quite amazing. I’ve tried to find more of her work online, but no luck so far.

I’ve joined an art studio near work, so I can now go to classes and use the studio whenever I want. There are lots of classes on offer, and it’s also a nice sociable place.

My aim in taking classes is to improve my technique and stretch my mind so that I can find more interesting ways to draw or paint the subjects that give me pleasure. Which means lots of figures with animal heads, men in fancy clothes, masked Venetians, and the occasional bit of porn.

This is a new minotaur, half copied from the last one, which was copied from a couple of photos. The head teacher discourages students from working from photographs, saying that it hinders you in developing our own style because you concentrate too much on just copying the picture. And I can see her point. I’m going to try to use more drawings from life as references from now on. If I want to walk a mile or so up the canal, there’s a water buffalo tethered on a vacant block, so perhaps I should go there and try to do a life study. They’re rather handsome bovines with clean-cut faces that ought to be easy to draw. Speaking of water buffaloes, bareback water buffalo racing!

Copypasting my own critique from DA:

Cobbled 2 or 3 references together here, not counting the bull. Anatomy could be better, hands and hips particularly, and the shadow inside the arms is probably too dark — or else the head needs more texture/detail to draw the eye to it.

And the style of drawing isn’t exactly exciting — I have a ton of trouble getting accuracy and liveliness into one picture (hey, I have enough trouble with accuracy!)

Still, I’m pretty happy with it.