Lately I have been very busy preparing for the Three Rivers Arts Festival, but I have made a little time to create a new painting.
What's it for? Well, in short, it is a submission to this fun art competition called "Discovering a Muse". You can read all about it here: http://artorder.blogspot.com/2010/03/discovering-muse.html
But it's much more than that. I was trying to create something interesting for the competition, sure, but I also wanted to tie it in to the top secret project that I am working on for myself. I will reveal more about all of that here in my blog at a later time. But for now I can say it involves: adventure, angels, ghosts, the Watchers, Nephilim, rednecks, cultists, and prophecy.
So, you may be asking, "what the heck are the Watchers"? Well... the subject of my painting! Here is a link to a page that can explain more in depth about them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watcher_(angel)
I was trying to imagine what it would have been like in the time that the Watchers fell. And I thought it would be nice to create a painting of this forbidden love between a human and an angel. It was so forbidden that the angel fell from heaven just to be with her, and she was also cursed by God. They would have been outcast from every community and everything they had ever known. And their kids? Eeek! Those were the Nehilim, and I don't even want to get started on that topic at this time. Look it up on Wikipedia if you are still curious.
Ok, You have probably noticed a few things about the painting I did, like the fact that her eyes are closed and she is not looking at him, and that's because she is not facing the reality that he is not human and she is not focusing on what will happen to her if she falls in love with him. I also thought it would be interesting to depict him as clearly non-human, and a little scary. Not all angels are pretty ladies with swan wings or big fat baby angels like what you see in rococo art, in fact most are really scary to behold. Biblical accounts tell us that typically they have had to say "Be not afraid" to the prophets they visited. And what the heck is this guy in the painting doing? He is looking at us as if to say "yeah, she's all about me and you can't do anything about it." He is toying with a lock of her hair, and I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the 200 Watchers who fell before the great flood had a thing for the ladies with pretty hair. There are reasons why he is ultra pale colored with glowing eyes and black wings, all of these things are pretty standard in accounts of these types of angels. I added face paint and tattooing because it made him look more fierce, and that's something he would need because the angels who did not fall made war on the Watchers. Going up against the archangel Michael? Yeah, you're gonna need every advantage you can get.
Ok, enough of that. I wanted to be sure to invite everyone out there in blogo-webo-sphere to come and visit me at the Three Rivers Arts Festival this year! If you are in the Pittsburgh area at this time, I will be there from June 9-13, 2010. Booth #59
I will post more about this closer to time, including images of original paintings that I will be selling... so if you love Call of Cthulhu, Legend of the 5 Rings (L5R), Middle Earth, or any of the other millions of games I have illustrated for; make sure you stop by.
http://www.artsfestival.net/
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