Manly P Hall

“Ignorance fears all things, falling, terror-stricken before the passing wind. Superstition stands as the monument to ignorance, and before it kneel all who realize their own weakness who see in all things the strength they do not possess” ― Manly P Hall, The Lost Keys of Freemasonry: Or the Secret of Hiram Abiff

 Ala Prima| Oil on canvas | 9”x12”

Manly Palmer Hall then, peering from furrowed brow, as if he was trying to cut glass with his eyes and looking for all the world like a matinee idol from the Golden age.  A sort of mystic Valentino for the ages, or at least their Secret Teachings. 

He’s another one of those forgotten esoteric figures on the fringe, who along with Mathers and Blavatsky, are curios lost to the dusty back rooms of new age bookshops, that no doubt used to line Melrose avenue. 
And until a few years back, his magnum opus-The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, would knock you back a few thousand bucks.

Someone who described himself as a “last resort for troubled people” his considerable acuity and palliative voice, lives on at least in lectures on YouTube, which have been accompanying my painting marathons for a while now. His Icosahedron based on the Golden ratio, even found it’s way into my last series for my painting “The Origins of Death”.
In an era that feels like a “monument to ignorance”, the voluminous spiritual wisdom of MPH are like an antidote.

Painted Ala Prima in one sitting, it’s available for purchase from my store from the following link

MPH Portrait

Dali

Oil on canvas
9″ x 12″

Between prepping the canvas and sketching for the next piece, I knocked out another Alla Prima portrait in a couple of hours today.

Dali -in my opinion the greatest artist of the 20th century-has become so ubiquitous that the impact his surreal art had on me when I first encountered ‘The Death of Narcissus’ in a copy of Man, Myth and Magic in the 1970’s, seems almost neutered by its legacy into mono culture.

That mustache like an upturned curly bracket so synonymous, that the portrait didn’t resemble him, until the follicular finishing touch.

Still, the work remains utterly phenomenal and back then I was utterly obsessed, so I shan’t understate the influence he had on my own artistic quest.

In fact, I still read his wonderfully salacious ‘Unspeakable Confessions’ yearly, because the enigma of his work was made all the more profound by the fact that he was as mad as cheese.

Rasputin

Oil on canvas,
9″x 12″

With Russia in the news again, I thought it’d be quite nice to trot out one of the Slavs other infamous sons- the Mad Monk, Grigori Rasputin-Alla Prima.

He’s another of those fascinating esoteric cult figures, from the time of the Romnovs, ministering all manner of occult practices from Theosophy to being faith healer to Tsar Nicholas’s son, Alexei.

A nice gig if you can get it, particularly if  the laying on of hands extends to the local nunnery.

Ongoing rumors of an affair and his influence over the Tsarina Alexandra, that such were the times then, it wasn’t too long before he was knocked off, although given that it took an afternoon buffet of arsenic laced cakes and wine, three bullets-one in the forehead- and dropping in the frigid Nevka waters to do the trick, may lend to the reputation of his mystical prowess, and the rumor that he did a zombie Jesus.

Regardless, the fall of the Romanovs wasn’t too far behind.

One hopes a similar fate awaits the current US dynasty.