NEWS

News.... A strange little film distributor has picked up a couple of my short experimental films. I don't know much about the organization except that they are San Francisco based and the stuff on the site looks unreal. I'm not on a DVD compilation yet but it might get picked up, who knows?

http://microcinema.com/filmsResults.php?director_id=1557

Also....I received a North Carolina Arts Grant to work on a new short film. It is tentatively entitled "Nocturne" and focuses on a young girl (played by Allison) who finds herself in a sleep clinic being treated for a variety of terror inducing sleeping disorders and out of body experiences. I shot some of the film last summer and I have resumed work in the last month. I am using a variety of "experimental" formats for the film including 8 MM, PixelVision (a Fischer Price toy camera made in the 80's), and Mini-DV O Lux night vision. The experience is partly based on my Dad's experience working in a sleep clinic in Mississippi this year. Above is a still from the footage shot thus far.

This page is connected with the text on the below page. This text references eagle, ox, human, and lion creatures (symbolizing the 4 Gospel writers) singing praises to the lamb. I smeared the text by moving it on a copy machine...the same technique was used on the creatures (which I found in medieval scripts). I'm following Andy's advice on focusing on the text more (which is the Geneva Bible from 1500s).
click to enlarge genius.

This may be my new favorite maybe because I'm happy with how well the seven-eyed, seven-horned lamb turned out. I drew the lamb and hand cut out the eyes from various medieval woodcuts. Most of this page was created that way. I wanted to find a unique but minimal way of portraying the lamb figure so vividly described in Chapter 5. The above page is really a continuation of this page (too much to cram into one design!)
click to enlarge genius.

A new entry for Chapter 2 of Revelation. The text smear was done on a copy machine by moving the page as it scanned...a technique I borrowed from German artist Sigmar Polke. The Celtic design on the right was drawn by me, scanned in, and color reversed in Photoshop so that my black ink lines became white. It was important to me to have a reference to illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.
click to enlarge genius.

A newer version of one of the early posts. I added the candles at the bottom (a reference from Chapter 5 that some artists have interpreted as a menorah). I took the candles from a Durer print.
click to enlarge genius.

A couple of people have asked me about the source material for my Revelation project so I thought I would explain a couple of things about what I am pulling into the pages. My friend Carla asked me about the Golden Mean references. As I said in my previous post all of my Revelation pages are based on the Golden Rectangle which relates to Phi (1.6180339887…..etc, to infinity), the never repeating number of the Golden Ratio (not to be confused with Pi). All of the Math diagrams in my Revelation pages somehow relate to this Golden Ratio. As I said, the pages of my “book” are the proportion of this ratio and if you look at the first image I posted you can see the Golden ratio proportion placed vertically within the overall proportion of the page.

Let me say that I am not a Math person at all (beyond Geometry). That is to say, I did not perform well in Math class and Mrs. Durrell and Mrs. Frye had to basically drag me through high school Algebra. I am interested in Math though, at least how it relates to cultures, the construction of the Universe and the big man behind the curtain. Almost all of my Golden Mean fascination comes from a wonderful little book by Mario Livio entitled “The Golden Ratio”. Although the book is written from a secular point of view, Livio doesn’t shrink from attributing a Holy status to the Golden Mean. He mentions several times that this special number and proportion is often known as God’s signature or The Divine Proportion. This is because it is so prevelant in His creation…from the spiral of the galaxy and the shell on the beach to the pattern in seeds in a sunflower. If you have seen the movie Pi you know what I’m talking about.

How does all of this relate to John’s Patmos Revelaton visions? Well, if you have ever watched 10 minutes of Jack Van Impe (brilliant and possibly mad doomsday Revelation interpretor televangelist that I have linked to the right) you know that the study of numbers and the Bible goes back 5,000 years. Again, see the movie Pi which actually has some historical basis in the Torah / numerology section of the film. The book of Revelation is a particular hotbed of number speculation. If you are into Norwegian black metal bands like Gorgoroth (like my Mom is, she loves cookie monster vocals) then you will know…666 is the number of the Dark One, right? Revelation was written in numerical and symbolic code. An example of this connection is 666 itself as described by Thomas Cahill in “Desire of the Everlasting Hills”:

In his (John’s) world, letters were used as shorthand to represent numerical values, as is the case with the Roman numerals we are still familiar with. So we need only find a well-known historical figure (the writer implies clearly that it is a ‘man’ known to everyone) whose name ‘adds up’ to 666. The Hebrew alphabet contained now vowels. The name of the emporer under whom the Jesus Movement’s two greatest ‘prophets’ were executed wasNero Caesar, in Greek Neron Kaisar, in unvoweled Hebrew nrwn qsr or, giving these consonants their conventional numerical value, 50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200, which equals 666. The Beast is the Roman empire - more precisely, all the cruelties of Roman political domination – personified by Nero Caesar. "

John himself claims in Revelation that his vision “calls for insight; but anyone with discernment may figure out the number of the Beast. It is the number of a man, the number Six Hundred Sixty-Six.” It is the multiple levels of meaning and the elastic symbolism that make Revelation so interesting for me. I also love how the Revelation throw out timelines and chronology all together and enters directly into a world of dreams….as Cahill also points out “Christ, the slaughtered lamb, is first seen in heaven, after which the Savior is given birth by Isreal”. I will reference more of this symbolism later. The more I haved delved into Revelation the more I have seen the cleverness of the symbols that are, again, not always as murky as people assume. The challenge to illustrating the Book is that it is so amazingly dense in its references. To illustrate every detail mentioned would be to cram a page beyond recognition.

In looking at Artist’s who have taken on Revelation I have found one who, for me, is the golden standard (pun intended). And he seems to have pulled off doing what intimidates me…cramming in a gonzo number of references (including the Golden Mean!). This artist is Albrect Durer (see below example), a German Northern Ren. Artist who lived in the 15 th century. His mind-blowing woodcuts are full of detail and he found so many creative ways to include even the most abstract symbols (a lamb with seven eyes and seven horns who is given to opening a scroll with seven seals for instance). He was close to being a contemporary of Heironomous Bosch if that tells you anything about the day and age he lived in. His work would be extremely detailed if it were pen drawings, the fact that they are woodcuts are unfathomable. Anyway, I am actually including or referencing (or stealing) some of Durer’s prints in my Revelation work and I will point out what is his to give the dead guy some credit when I post them. Just remember before you judge that Warhol did an entire series using DaVinci’s “Last Supper” and no one cracked wise on the little white wigged man.

Durer is included in the aforementioned book “The Golden Ratio” along with a variety of other artists throughout the ages. Actually, I will conclude by saying I am especially amazed by the information about all of the artists who incorporated the Golden Mean in their work. It isn’t too unpredictable that Da Vinci used it but what astonished me was that this kind of thing had precidence to him. Several early Renn. works are shown to precisely inscribe the ratio in the figure or composition in the 13 th century. A famous more contemporary example is “Sacrament of the Last Supper” by Dali…the paintings proportion is the Golden Ratio (105.5 X 65.75) and to make it as freakin’ obvious as possible he included a huge dodecahedron behind Christ. A dodecahedron is a 12 sided regular solid in which each side is a pentagon…most importantly it is directly related to the Ratio. I will let the conspiracy theorists note the pentagon and take it from there.

Albrecht Durer presents: St. John eats a Bible.