"the Ghost of Medusa"Oil on Canvas
12" x 24"
The mornings are starting to cool, and a dense mist hangs over the wild palms.
I love this time of year.
I've been in a bit of a fog myself this past week, waking in the middle of a night in a frenzy, freaking about the last minute preps for the forthcoming exhibits, living on four hours a night, and beginning each day swirling palettes and consuming copious amounts of tea.
I shalln't truly find the sleep of the dead until the last stroke.
I suppose I'm a man possessed-off the charts and obsessively compulsively picking at the scab of everything I do.
There's some of that in this latest piece I suppose-'The Ghost of Medusa'-though truly its something I've been working towards for twenty years. There are half realized traces of it in drawings I did as far back as 85, it's eerie. Was it prescient or just self fulfilled prophesy? Who cares-I'm in love with the piece-it feels like the herald of a new direction. It's realisation was organic and as natural as breathing-if I must annotate though, it partly has its foundation in the quote from Jack London's novel-'The Mutiny of Elsinor'', which I discovered very recently. In it he says-
"...Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Mayan-Lie (illusion)"
For myself, those words encompass perfectly life's deflections from the shadows of the night.
Along with my continuing obsession with the cosmic resonance of the number three-(Medusa was part of a trinity of Gorgons), I should relate that my dead friend Martin had completed a drawing of Medusa before he died. It hadn't occurred to me until I was working on it. The arc continues.
I have perhaps two more pieces in me before delivery date-though something of a backtrack in the sense that they shall compliment the last gasp of the original Theothanatos series.
Onward and upwards.
Bring it.
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