Wendigo by Lou Rogers, my mother. Oil on canvas.
A hungry wind was crying ‘round the house last night in bitter cold, tearing the skin off the snow. It put me in mind of this image. My mother painted her vision of the Wendigo at least twice, and I knew its name when I was very small. Her favorite tale of the Wendigo was the literary one by Algernon Blackwood. The Wendigo is a legendary being of Algonquian-speaking cultures. Its name appears in various forms: Windiga, Witiko, Weendigo...
I miss...
...working large. One of my angels, who flew to a dome (see "Liturgical Work" gallery) and had a 14 foot wingspan. I need to find a vulnerable building. But meantime, a Merry Midwinter to us!
On the Work Table
Creatures pending: two tiny faeries and one tiny Asian ghost, the Hut belonging to Baba Yaga no. 1, Mr. Faun no. 2, possibly another Eros, a Circe. Skeletons of Baba Yaga and Vasilisa no. 2. We shall see more soon. I am also eager to resume the two-dimensional efforts.
Read moreMonday, September 14, 2009 at 12:22 AM
"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time."
~Thomas Merton
Sunday, July 5, 2009 at 02:14 PM
“Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.” ~ André Gide
With thanks to Fran, who sent it!
The Red Horseman
Kind and most Patient Friends,
Reports of my demise have been at least modestly exaggerated. Here’s a scan of the Sunrise Horseman from Vasilisa the Beautiful (my increasingly tattered dummy thereof) just to let you know I’m still kicking. More anon, but for now:
8 Good Words
"I shut my eyes in order to see."
~ Paul Gauguin, 1848 - 1903
My Artist Mother (post Mother's Day)
Lou Rogers, working at the Rudolph N. Rohn liturgical arts company in Pittsburgh, PA, in the early 1980's.
And on the Mountain, over Boulder, CO, at 20 years old. She saw the Mountains both as entities in themselves and as populated with numinous beings, which manifested in her paintings and writings.My Great Hobby-Novel
Friends,
No pictures quite yet, but speaking of the macabre, I’ll taunt you with a snippet from my hobby-novel, with which I play on occasion. Being that my ‘work’ is visual, I find writing a fine flight into play. My ‘book,’ which may well never advance beyond scraps & bits, is a... what to call it: a grotesque, perhaps, concerning a deranged liturgical artist, a woman who’s lost half her face to fire, and a mighty strange sanatorium with it’s own chapel. The deranged artist, Philip Waithe, is painting murals in the chapel, which have to do with my Fiendish Plot. It’s set around 1900.
I toy with this dubious opus in first person; a journal for each main character. While I don’t consider myself quite as deranged, and certainly not as homicidal, as the artist depicted, it does give a place to ‘use’ my own creative processes and curious adventures.
From Deranged Philip’s journal, which he scratches on the scaffold in the Deranged Chapel, as he lies on a narrow scaffold board in the dome:
...
Philip Waithe, date unknown:
“I have lain seven hours with Lazarus, and still I cannot see his face. I have caressed the winding cloth with ocher and sienna, touched the feet with a merest sliver of vermilion, yet the head where the spirit must look out remains blind.
It cannot be forced.
I look away. I shift on my narrow bed, and am held in an arc of scarlet tipped quills and gold. I spread my arms into nothing, feel the fever bleed out, feel my breath settle, still. I say, Beloved, make me transparent. I wait, I lose thought, quiet my spirit to a flawless water. I see. I see reflected there the Descent into Hell.
I have drawn it on the East wall.”
...
A horrid dream image...
More pictures anon, kind and patient Visitors!
For the moment, just a note on an unsettling dream -- I do love dreams in their deep strangeness, however unpleasant...
I slept last night after brooding over various and irreparable blunders, and dreamt that I was arriving late and in the night at a hotel room in some distant city. It was a dim and ordinary room. As I approached the bed, I saw its covers were mussed, though it appeared empty. Then I perceived a dreadful thing protruding from under the blanket: it was a strange naked foot on a bone-thin leg, human-seeming yet somehow wrong. It took a moment of loathsome staring to see that in place of toes, the foot possessed human fingers, long and curled, and somewhere, I think, a thumb.
There was no place for the rest of a body in those deflated bed clothes.
Baba Yaga, with bones
And in need of hair-gel and better rags:
Baba Yaga, en disahabille
Not quite dressed yet...
Baba Yaga's Jewelry
“Birds with Human Souls”
A delightful book called Birds with Human Souls, A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Beryl Rowland, 1978) was given me by a dear friend (Cindy! You!). Amongst many a wonder, it tells of ancient Athenian coins on which “a chubby, smiling goddess with a plain helmet appeared with a well-groomed, self-confident owl.”
It mentions the great flock of owl coins produced from the Laureotic silver mines, and quotes the most charming depiction of financial prosperity I’ve ever read:
Little Laureotic owlets
Shall be always flocking in:
You shall find them all about you,
As the dainty brood increases,
Building nests within your purses;
Hatching little silver pieces.
~ Aristophanes, The Birds, c. 414 BC
May many dear little owlets roost with us all during the coming year...
Baba Yaga with Chin Hairs
One cannot have too many. I'll get a better shot of them later, but for the moment:
That's Vasilisa underway you see in the background. More of her soon...