If you follow your imagination and some ink into deep space who knows what you’ll see.
Alien spacecraft approaching… Mechanica… Organica… and a Z.
We’re doomed!
I can’t forget the original ink. It could be an artifact of a bygone era by 3030.
Related Mechanical Organical Spacecraft:
“The Monster was the best friend I ever had.” ~ Boris Karloff
How many times have I said I love monsters? Here’s the original inked goodness, but otherwise I rest on the quote above……
Related Monstrosities:
“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast.” ~ Lord Byron
This is another spacecraft hybridization of the mechanic and the organic and what I call a mechanical organical. The triangular cluster of dots to the left of the craft echoes my own encounter with a genuine UFO. Those three dots used to appear in a lot of my drawings, sort of a signature of mine. I’ll tell you the whole story another time.
The piece was also inspired in part by one of my favorite anime series: Neon Genesis Evangelion. Some of those Angels look almost like spaceships.
I was pretty blatant in establishing the mechanic-organic duality. I tried to use organic shapes on the left of the ship and more mechanic one’s on the right. There are even branches, veins and even leaf-like structures growing out of the left side and trailing arm tentacles like a jelly fish’s ready to stun anything foolish enough to drift in its wake.
One of my process drawings gave off more of a Death Angel Baby than a fully matured Angel of Death.
I continued to experiment and so developed its darker and more sinister Papa.
You might remember the old Passover story about the Angel of Death “passing over” the first born children of the Israelites thanks to the blood of a lamb painted across their doors. I’ll tell you one thing, this one ain’t passing over no one. An indiscriminate executioner!
Related Mechanical Organical Spacecraft:
We all have our Big Fish stories……What’s yours?
Related Fishy Posts
“I’ve tasted the maggots of the mind of the universe. I was not offended…” ~ Funkadelic
So what is today’s sketch all about? Hmmmmm……. Should I tell them the truth? It’s a Hummingbird. Yup , a hummingbird, tick, maggot brain burrowing through the crevices of hyper-dimensional surfaces in the all mysterious holographic infinity of the multiverse. It’s actually a spaceship: a mechanical organical. This spaceship can and has traversed through the Alpha and Omega…. It’s seen the Yin and the Yang, the bang at the beginning and the crunch at the end, the event at the horizon, Buddha’s fingertips like dark matter monoliths holding up the universe…..the place that tongue can’t tell.
The spaceship has also burrowed trans-dimensionally through each and every pocket and layer of the under and over worlds. Hummmmmed through every spectrum of frequencies, leisurely crossed an Einstein-Rosen bridge and seen that cool spiraling light show in galactic time. You haven’t truly lived until you’ve hopped hyperdemensionally through pockets bounded with surfaces of time. Jay’s SPaceShip travels through what I would like to call the bleed and it has taken notes….and some doodles….
Sci-fi enough for y’ah? Are you entangled in this quantum state? I’m sure you could figure out what I’m talking about if you’re willing to go there……. Anyway, I want to to talk you people out there….. Who is watching Lost?…. Love that show!
What’s the deal? Can we start a discussion on my website? Can we find some cyberpunks, anybody on the web to throw some comments out there? This corner of the cyberspace is waiting already. What the F#@%k?….. What does it all mean?…… Say whatever you want, just comment. Say something cool. Have fun. Say something that’ll inspire me, you, or anybody to draw or paint something…..Talk about whatever you want. Are you ready to jump on this rocket ship?! We’re all going interstellar…… If you’re ready……. it’s time to Be Free Create and Grow Roots. I have a secret plan tentatively called the Community Art Project 1.0. Watch out for details.
Your neighborhood friendly artist Jay Zuckerman signing off till next time and leaving you with one of my favorite songs of all time….. Maggot Brain!
Interstellar Posts:
The dark clown is what emerged from broad brush strokes of ink, an ink wash, and a touch of water color which I used to stain the inkwash. I was going for a kind of noir vibe. I love Frank Miller stuff. I don’t think I was even going for a clown initially just some bold dark brush strokes with some intensity, expressiveness, and contrast between light and dark.
The archetypal clown to me is a grotesque exaggeration and is something positively creepy in that we never actually see their faces. The clown hides behind his paint and makes no bones about being an in-your-face distortion. I am also certainly not the first nor the last to consider the irony of the clown whether sad, evil, or in my case dark.
So why did today’s sketch of the day end up a clown at all? How did a study of light and dark with a bold and expressive intention become this?
Honestly, I’m finding myself momentarily lost in thought and feeling like I am all over the place in explaining something simple. Quite actually, I see a sereneness in my dark clown noir that I find peaceful. It is more authentic than ironic and grotesque, and only ironic by piercing through the expectation of irony.
Actor Lon Chaney Sr. once said, “there is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.” He was right of course, but at the moment, I am more interested in whether there is something true.
More Clowning Around:
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent
will . . .” ~ Charlotte Bronte
The long dead English novelist who somehow knew the attitude of my pen and the freedom of being not. Either that or we can enjoy bending her words in my context to support me out on this limb.
It is possible to be without being. I can see it in the shadow of the bird and I hope you’ll ponder with me… Be Not, Be Free!
Related Posts:
From whence arrived the praying mantis?
From outer space, or lost Atlantis?
glimpse the grin, green metal mug
at masks the pseudo-saintly bug
~ Ogden Nash
I was thinking of drawing an alien, but then I decided to draw a preying mantis sketch instead. Like much of the insect world it is pretty alien-like and I got the same satisfaction as if it truly was an alien creature.
The word Mantis comes from the Ancient Greek word for seer. The French believe that if you are lost the praying mantis points the way home while Arabs contend it points the way to Mecca. I believe that I will be drawing a Praying Mantis again sometime soon.
Related Posts
Did I draw it or are you Hallucinating? I guess it all depends….
I remember when I drew this more than few years back. Art school was tough and while I was learning a lot, I didn’t feel like I was creating art anymore.
Art for me was always a deeply personal reflection and by various teachers preventing me, from being me, it sometimes felt as if I was losing myself along with my art. I knew going in that art school was all about tearing you down before it built you back up, but sometimes it felt that nothing was good enough.
And so late one night as I was contemplating my predicament in art and life, I scribbled. And I scribbled. And I scribbled some more.
Being a little bit out there was nothing new to me. It was who I was. Infuse that with a little anger and frustration and a desperate need to create something which bodly stated: this is who I am!
I remember bringing this into class and showing it to my teacher in the hope he might get a glimpse inside my head. He didn’t really have very much to say. I don’t know if it was because he didn’t much like it or just didn’t care, but one thing I can tell you is that I like this piece. I am showing it to you because it is a reminder of who I am and who I used to be.
I have come along way since then. I have found the happy middle ground between my personal sense of style and structured, composed, and focused art. No harm in looking back though.
Every time I look at this it feels like time travel: a hallucination of years past which has the power to transport my entire state of mind. Thanks for following me back in time. Tomorrow we will go back to the future. Great Scott!
“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” ~ H. P Lovecraft
From the universe of the Barge of Dead, comes yet another dark entity. The very wake of the Barge spawns these Darklings. They float aimlessly through the universe like a Portuguese Man of War with tentacles that can suck the very life essence out of anything it comes across.
Here is a Siphonophore and a close relative to the Portuguese Man of War so you have an inkling of what I am talking about:
The Darklings voracious hunger for the pure essence of life is never satisfied and this unyielding hunger drives them to grow larger and larger.
The beings generally start off small, but with the more life they consume they continue to grow without bound. They have been known on occasion to grow to such immense size as to be able consume entire planets and even galaxies. Perhaps our very own Milky Way will one day be enveloped in those expansive and deadly tentacles.
Finally, as I like to do often, I present some of my developmental work which went into this image.
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Related Sketch: