Scratchboard fun and The Nightmare Paintings

Holocaust in Utopia

Created as a Scratchboard etching

I love this medium, Scratchboard/Clayboard/Scraperboard. It can be effective in works of strong light and shadow contrast obviously and with some skill one could doe work to the level of Dore and his engravers. This was my first attempt at it, but i will be coming back to this more and more. Currently I am working on a image based on Emily Bronte's tragic and tormented story Wuthering Heights. This is the right medium for such a work, though one must prepare thoroughly as mistakes are difficult, if not impossible, to reverse in scratchboard.

On another more marvellous note, I have been invited to have works showing in an exhibition of Aleister Crowley's Nightmare Paintings. Myself, and several other artists, including Barry Hale, Nathan Hopkins and Corinne MacIain have created works based on some of the designs from the Nightmare and Heaven rooms from the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu. The Abbey no longer exists as anything more than ruins, but Crowley had produced a beautiful and quite visionary tourist guide giving descriptions and deeper insights into the wall paintings there.

The exhibition is at Buratti Fine Art in North Fremantle, Western Australia and is running until late February 2013 if i recall correctly.

Love is the law, love under will.

March 2012

Steampunk ideas and other dregs, but something else has emerged and in the perhaps hopeless desire to be a decent artist in the digital medium, i am working to give illustration to various moments in the life of Aleister Crowley and the advent of the New Aeon - i am actually surprised that this type of task has not been done or attempted, but i will attempt this and i want to approach it more like academic painting - I love the use of light and shadow in 19th century painting. This is also important given the underlying wish to depict aspects of the Tree of the Nightside/ the Qliphotic states, in their nightmarish lurid atrocity.

 Denizens of the Astral Realsm of Refuse and forgotten Habits.

Produced in Photoshop CS4, February 2012

Inspired by the wonderful work of Wayne Barlowe - in particular his Inferno work which is similar to what and where I wish to take my vain creations. I was not aware of his work when i started this all but have only become so in the trawling of the internet for inspiration and ideas that one can do at times - in particular when looking up images of Goetic Spirits.

The Nineteenth Key, 

Created in PS CS4, March 2012. 

Featured in a recent Steampunk Exhibition at Post Industrial Design in West Footscray, Melbourne.

November 2011 Images Other figures, forms and streams

"Salome"

November 2011

Created through Photoshop CS4

A portrait of the biblical-mythical figure of Salome, the daughter of Herodias, with the head of John the Baptist.