Mural

Wonderful First Nations inspired Mural that was  under a bridge I passed while biking on the Galloping Goose Trail  just last week on Vancouver Island,  in Victoria, British Columbia. The woman is reaching her arm out to join that of a man's on the other side of the tunnel.Have to confess it was her that caught my eye, not him!

Happy Holidays everyone!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

A Happy Lughnasadh to All

Pictured is Lugh - The mythic founder of the feast of Lughnasadh, the ancient Celtic festival he established to commemorate the passing of his his foster mother, Tailtiu - the defeated Firbolg queen who is said to have brought the growing of grain to ancient Ireland by her labours in clearing it's dark forests -  is held around the first days of August. August 1 is tomorrow, hence this picture.

A word about it's creation:
A digitally-created work, one of  4  on the theme of Lammas/Lughnasadh created for an Artist trading card exchange. The other 3 may be seen by accessing my Gallery at the  ATCS for ALL site on the sidebar.


Lugh himself is actually an outdoor sculpture of the ancient fighter, Vercingetorix atop a pillar by the 19th century French sculptor Aime Millet...I coloured him digitally fo this ATC card , as I much admired his stolid and heroic pose... the long spear I added in, as it has been mentioned, along with the bag at his waist, as objects that always accompany him.
His giant horse is from a 1901 post-card and his hunting hound from Morgue File.
The stormy back-ground is my own photo from a field near Rocky Mountain house, here in Alberta , the stylized frame is in the public domain.

Happy Easter

Shades of Black, White and Gray : Tarot card 15

Tarot card XV-The Devil

I tend to use a lot of Public Domain imagery in my cards, and am going to try to do better in this new year to give more credit where credit is due - Library of Congress /LOC and the New York Public Library /NYPL here!

I’ve downloaded a huge amount of imagery and put them in various folders for future use……
Having an idea already in my head for The Devil card, I pretty well knew what folders to access for imagery and initially - after first choosing what I thought of as an appropriately dramatic back-ground for them - narrowed down to about 21 to possibly use… I put them in a new folder so I could visually see the mix together to try and pick out the best matches for the back-ground…..and then chose my three main ones

Went for shades of grey, as I think that’s my overall feeling on this subject card…..
I think, really, we are our own agents - bar a catastrophe-like being in a War ,or having some kind of illness- things not of our doing- we more or less make our own personal ‘hells’ just as we go about our daily lives…

So I was quite surprised when I came up with an “Eve” image for the woman, and an unaware “Adam”-type …the wonderful operatic Mephistophicles figure was just too fitting for the background NOT to have him there overseeing it all!
A diagram of the Golden Mean -what we want to achieve/have,and mostly beyond our grasp- kind of finished off the symbolism from being somewhat quasi- religious to more simply just speculative……I hope!
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Back-ground: Stage design of 1896 by one Adolphe Appia
Man: LOC image from 1860 by one Marconi
Woman: NYPL image from their theatre database
Devil: from a turn-of-the-last Century Russian operatic production of Faust

Shades of Black, White and Gray III : Gothic Collages

All Things Gothic Collages

I was inspired again to continue creating more old-fashioned style Gothic scenes in black and white tones, and the arches format

They are

Night at the Opera (albeit not the Bros Marx )!
The Awakening
The Meeting Place and
The Summons

All are public domain images- original stage or movie stills figures set into new backgrounds- backed by the patterned gel-layered napkin paper I made pictured behind them.