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Blew Artwork
There Be Dragons
There Be Dragons
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(36" x 36") - Acrylic Paint and Plaster on Canvas
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Full color prints are available upon request.
"There Be Dragons" is my second painting in the pareidolia series and arguably the most complex and challenging painting I have created thus far.
The subject matter and basic composition come from what I see in the random lines and marks I cast into plaster applied to the canvas at the beginning of the process. I had no preconceived ideas about dragons or knights or bones. In fact, I'm not a huge fan of dragon stories or movies, much less knights in shining armor. But I let this process of seeing order and patterns in chaos happen naturally without preferentially editing the visual cues to my liking.
This "pareidolia process" involves creating a random, unintentional base painting with layers of wet paint scrubbed into plaster fissures and depressions. Then perhaps the most important step: staring at the base painting for several hours, rotating the canvas clockwise, to visualize any patterns or recognizable shapes that stand out in the chaos. Sometimes patterns appear almost instantly. Other times visual noise is the only thing staring back at me.
After analyzing the base painting, there is a period of noting the most dominant patterns with a rough black outline. This is where randomness meets free will. A composition emerges giving visual noise both structure and order. What was once amorphous gradually becomes a coherent idea that brings meaning and story into the light (as illustrated in the three process images).
Three dominant, independent patterns emerged from the vail of the under painting: a medieval helmet, a masked face, and a serpentine body. Over time these images took a narrative leap as they coalesced into a visual story about chivalrous knights and a hideous monster.
As the painting progressed, I began to question the simplicity of the story I thought I saw in the chaos. The good guy knights, archaic symbols of bravery and honor for the mother country, confronting the bad guy monster, a three-headed destroyer symbolizing danger, terror, and Nature's twisted malevolence toward Man. Perhaps the story is more interesting and more accurate if it becomes a cautionary tale about the monster in all of us. While the macabre creatures inhabiting the shadows of our imaginations are truly frightful, perhaps the most terrifying of all monsters are the ones hiding right in front of us in plain sight. They are wrapped in the same red cloak as we are, alerting our imaginations with a silent stare to snap out of the delusion that our cities, technology, and affluence have overcome what the Apostle Paul called "the Old Man", what Freud called the "Id", and what Jung called the "Shadow" in all of us.
