Three Snakes

 I did another Celtic Knot!  This one is loosely inspired by an M. C. Escher woodcut, (shown below), which happened to be the last design he did before he died.

 

I get all that from a big book of M. C. Escher’s artwork I’ve got called Impossible Worlds: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/998629.Impossible_Worlds

You can see that I didn’t finish my work to quite as many iterations of infinity as Escher, and it doesn’t have quite the level of craftsmanship, but still I’m always pretty happy when I finish another knot!

Guy With A Twig

 

The great thing about being a fairy or borrower or wee folk or whatever is that you can be walking along and a lot of things can be fairly similar, like moss looks a lot like grass and rocks are basically boulders but then you come to things like this, where there's a giant twig or a leaf like a crumpled up tent, or a giant acorn, or a pine needle or two and that part is all very different.  Its something I find fascinating.

Artwork 2020, Year In Review

 

 

 

 

I made a slideshow of all the artwork I did in 2020 in chronological order. :)

Artist Loadout

 Art takes decades to develop even at the best of times but sometimes it is all brought short by a disaster.

My room is a mess of course, I have artistic and literary projects strewn all over the place and I like it that way.  But lately I've been asking myself, what would I take with me if I had to leave in a hurry, like if I had to quit the country and my house might get destroyed.  Family?  Food?  Ammo?  That doesn't leave a lot of room for artwork and decades of toil would go up in flames.

Which leads to the hypothetical question that I have been asking myself and perhaps you should too:

What if all you had room for in your pack was a stack of paper, a book, a sketchbook, some pencils, and a few flash drives?  Would you ditch the sketchbook and pencils and bring more paper?  another couple books?  Smaller books?  Something else?  I don't even know what I'd do, but its something to think about.

Don't share your answers here.  We don't need the government to know.  But someones got to ask the important art questions, especially in an age where many hypothetical cases are not as hypothetical as we should hope.

The Color Version

Like I said, the color version.  I think I'll keep working on these for a while.
 

The Pepper Tree

 

They said this was the worst year ever and I didn't believe them. Sure everyone's hopes and dreams in the whole world were being fed through the wood chipper, but I personally was more well off. I got a little bit of time off work for a while there, which allowed me to work on art projects which was nice. And I've been making more money and working less which is great because it means more time to work on art projects. All in all its been a good (although not great) year for me working on art projects.

Certainly the evils of this year outweigh the good, but for me personally it had been a good year.

And then the neighbors across the street cut down the pepper tree. It was probably a couple hundred years old and it had been there my entire life for me. Every time I looked out the window there was an ocean of flowing green as whatever wind there was flowed through it. But some people, like Mordor Orcs, cannot abide beauty, and there is evil encamped against us. Yesterday it was there and today its just plain gone, they didn't even leave the stump. Its like if you lived in a house by the seaside and one day you woke up and found they'd just packed up the ocean and taken it away somewhere and gotten rid of it. And you'd never be able to see or hear or smell the waves coming in anymore. You'd say that was impossible but that's what happened.

So 2020 did turn out to be the worst year ever for me as well. That was December 30^th when they came in there roaring away all day with their chainsaws and chippers like the unholy nuisances they are, and here I am snagged on the tail end of it and pulled down like Gandalf by the Balrog in Mordor, the way 2019 snagged us all on the tail end of it with its bat virus from China.

That got me thinking about giant trees with regard to hopes and dreams and having everything you live for smashed or destroyed. You can't just plant a two hundred year old tree, not unless you get it from somewhere else, they really don't grow up that way from seed.

So that got me thinking about life as an artist. Like a lot of artists I can never be content unless my work becomes the art equivalent of two or three hundred year old tree – no mere sapling with two or three leaves, growing in a little pot, but a vast and spreading sea of beauty – and it saddens me inconsolably to reflect that in this cruel world I will almost certainly be cut down long before that.

Its easy to say that destroying statues is merely a left wing movement and its just liberals that are trying to destroy America so if we could win all the time everything would be fine. But it isn't just liberals who partake in unspeakable acts in the destruction of beauty. I don't know what the actual political leanings are of the neighbors across the street, but it doesn't matter. As they said that tree was “just a liability” its the sort of thing anyone might do who appreciates “the value of hard work” more than the beauty of nature.

I used to think that everyone had a natural built in appreciation of the beauty of nature, but I guess some people have it more than others and some people are just a bunch of Mordor Orcs.

That tree was like a sea of flowing green feathers, and the wind of the world flowed through it, and now I will never see it again until I am reunited with it in heaven. But the sea of life flows on and I can only give the following advice for 2021 and beyond:

Batten down the hatches, and look out for squalls!

Crumbling Overgrown Ruins

 

Things I like about crumbling overgrown ruins.

To Be Continued!

I can keep going for many many more pages, and I think I’ll do a color version at some point.

:)