Look What The Cat Dragged In.

 8"x11"
Oil on wood panel

Since I've been all consumed by the new series, I hadn't really planned to be in anymore shows until unveiling Infernal next year. 

That was until I was asked by my friend-fellow artist Stephanie Inagaki, to contribute something for an upcoming fundraiser for Luxe Paws, an initiative to help the homeless cat situation in LA.    

Also, my moggie Ronin-the Prince of Purrsia, would never have forgiven me.

Ronin pleading to enter the studio

As DaVinci once noted, “the smallest feline is a masterpiece”, and having already featured  my cat  in the piece –“This Thing of Darkness, I Acknowledge Mine” I opted instead to paint this – salvaged from an old ink sketch, which up until now I’d adopted occasionally as a sort of working logo.

I suppose it could be emblematic of the artists dark flightiness, or at least his sky fall which I’m calling “Look What the Cat Dragged In”. Make of the title what you will.

It’ll be showcased virtually at Copro Gallery on June 6th anyway, with a portion of the proceeds in aid of  LA’s forsaken felines. More details as I have them.

As no small aside, I had the distinct honor of including Stephanie’s work when I curated my Tales from the Darkside show in 2018, so go check out her extraordinarily beautiful, and ethereal work for yourself.

Stephanie Inagaki

Stephanie Inagaki “Anamnesis” (2018) drawing 6.5” x 8.5”

Leper Messiah

"Illness brings ugliness in it's train"
Umberto Eco-On Ugliness

"He was an elemental being, so primitive that he might have 
spent the twenty-three years of his life immured in a cave." 

 The Elephant Man and other Reminiscences-Frederick Treeves

Joseph Carey Merrick then -the so called Elephant man- the king of "freaks."

When we think of him, we envision a shadowed, leprous phantom-like a lurching masked and cloaked sack of hidden pestilence, wandering the hazy cobbled alleyways, or the crowded platforms of the Victorian age.

A sad and noble figure, where the body outside, betrayed the internal virtues of the soul, deceived as he was by the rancorous tumors and putrescent flesh that ravaged his flesh, like some gruesome Ganesh figure.

Here of course I have him unadorned and entirely naked, reveling in the perversion of his decay, a spectacle of deliverance, for a defiled deity. 

Reading through Treeve's manuscript again, speaking of Merrick as a man whose existence had been so beleaguered, and yet had "passed through the fire" and emerged "ennobled...free from any trace of cynicism,resentment,or grievance" feels like no less than a savage indictment when compared to the daily morning dreadlines, that catalogue whining privileged and entitlement from those who would claim to hold the edge on piety.

 In an era of malediction and malady, where the ugliness stems from within,it is the internal body then, that betrays the external one.