Superman illustration for Warren Ellis contest

Superman illustration for Warren Ellis contest

REVELATION ONLINE!

Hi everyone,

Just a note to let you know that the entire Revelation Illustrated project is now online.  You can view the illuminations here.

Enjoy!

Closer and closer....only two Chapters left for my Revelation Project. I thought I would provide another teaser. This is Chapter 20, which describes the final judgement of Satan and the "lake of fyre". I have a large collection of old War photos and various medical images from 1970's Science Encyclopedias (thrift store fodder). I came across this great image of a crowd of gasmask-wearing humans. I have typically avoid more contemporary 20th century references but this seemed to work perfectly.






Here is how I used the gas mask crowd shot in Chapter 20 (part one). Those of you who know my early carson-newman college era work will notice a resemblance to an old painting that once hung in the Omega Gallery. CLICK TO ENLARGE

One of the things that has limited me in working with video is not having a lot of space (notice the outdoor woodsy settings for my work last year). Our new place has a nice big basement which I am working towards converting into a studio for both painting and low budget music and art videos. It is beautifully unfinished, naturally air conditioned, and has nice dirty concrete floors perfect for spilling paint!

The End is Near!

My illuminated book of Revelation is nearing completion after over 2 years of work (of course, I took a long hiatus when I, um, got married, got a new job in a new state, and bought a house). I have gotten a lot of support over the months for this project and I really like that I was able to find a topic (the end of the world?) that almost everyone seemed to have a reaction to.

The last month has been a real burst of energy for me. A new friend in England wrote me after an Asthmatic Kitty post by my wife led her to this blog. She was not only really supportive but she is buying a couple pages. This unexpected enthusiasm really made me think....if I didn't plow through this project then it could be years before I finished it. Knowing that I had 9 Chapters left and some other unfinished pages, I have been tearing through Revelation with new vigor. On a couple of days I completed a whole page / Chapter. I am now at the point of having only 4 Chapters left before the whole project is finished. That will be a very good day. Until that day and the launch of a "permanent" Revelation website with the complete works, I will probably hold off on revealing some of the pages. However, in the spirit of this blog...I will post a couple to let people know that Operation Revelation illumination IS still active.


Chapter XVI (click to enlarge)


Chapter II, part 2

OUTVIDEO in Russia

I just found out I will be in a show in Russia called OUTVIDEO. The theme of the show is 30 second silent videos that will be played in public spaces in Moscow and other highly populated areas. I reworked my short film Nocturne into a half minute piece that I'm pretty pleased with. It is short and sweet and even more mysterious in it's truncated form.

I'm assuming no one I know will be able to see my work shown. However, here is the link to the show. Should be interesting: OUTVIDEO

DEERMILK: The Werewolf Youth

Last weekend I traveled to Washington, D.C. for the opening of an art show entitled DEERMILK: The Werewolf Youth. I was apart of the "collective" organized by the intrepid Mike Lowery a.k.a. Thomas Michael Lowery a.k.a. Babyface. The show is at The Warehouse Gallery downtown and is running until April 21st.


The opening was a great success and I enjoyed making new connections and meeting some talented young artists. If you are living in the D.C. area then stop by and check out the interesting art that ranges from stuffed plush preternatural wolf-children to paintings / drawings / photographs to my 3 minute video. All of the work centers loosely around Mike Lowery's "feral youth" characters and all of the work is also reasonably priced. Congrats to Mike for all the buzz around D.C. for his great show.
You can view one of two versions of my video at my Youtube account

See images of the show below:

Downstairs gallery view of the DEERMILK show. My work is on left.

"Antler Girl" from the DEERMILK show. Ink, watercolor on paper. $120

"The Owl Girl" from the DEERMILK show. Ink and Acrylic on paper. $65.

A DEERMILK gallery shot that I took right before the show opened.

some of the talented artists in the show

I have finally finished my video for http://www.asthmatickitty.com. The song is a remix of My Brightest Diamond's "Disappear" by Cedar AV (a blip-hop group from Wisconsin). The Owl-girl dancer is Kasey Nichols, a student in my painting class who graciously filled in at the last minute. The zooming woods footage was shot in sequence with my cheap digital still image camera...imported into Premiere Editing and then pieced together frame by frame.

Asthmatic Kitty has asked 7 other video artist besides myself to create remix videos. Mine was the 4th posted. I look forward to the remaining videos to see the full set!

My website is updated! I finally have moving images on my video page (thanks, video google!). I've kept the original design with a few graphic additions. http://www.jymdavis.com

Nosferatu the Vampyre Pajamas

As mentioned in my last post, I have the school's enormous screenprinting machine up and running! My first endeavor with the photo emulsion was a Nosferatu screen print. Nothing says Christmas like a Vampyre from Prague. Anyway, the image above is my T-shirt and, my favorite, my new Nosferatu pajama bottoms. More screens to come and you can be sure it will be worked into Revelation projects.

As you might have noticed, my ambitious attempt to illuminate / illustrate the entire book of Revelation has taken a vacation for a few months. With roughly 8 or 9 chapters to go, I got distracted with working on music videos (http://www.myspace.com/jymdavis). However, recently I have found some new inspiration. The first part of my inspiration was figuring out how to use the massive screenprinting machine at school. This will allow me to readily screenprint and duplicate images using a photo sensitive screen. The second part of my inspiration was discovering a blues song entitled "John the Revelator" by Blind Willie Johnson. Hearing this song was a jolt of ideas. A host of artists have covered this song including Beck Hanson and Marianne Faithfull. There is a particulary energetic version by Nick Cave from the Harry Smith tribute concert:

Watercolor and Nocturne.

I am teaching watercolor class this Fall so I am reacquainting myself with the medium. I'm pretty feed-up with Acrylics anyway and the fake plastic look of the hues. Watercolor provides nice deep, rich colors. I thought I would work with the Nocturne theme again...this time without using video stills and being a little more fantastic with the room and the trees. I hope that reads to the viewer. Anyway, here is my hestitant return to painting. Hopefully more to come with better results! *click to enlarge*

Nocturne short film DVD cover. This is the version I am settling on. Hope to send these out in a couple of weeks.

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Hand stenciled DVDs are on the way. The movie is finally done.

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This is the second part to the below Chapter...it kind of spilled over. This is another page that is a challenge: the famous 666 page. I worked the numbers in red at the bottom and they are also copied inside the white smoke lines. The little smeary icons are the 4 gospel writers (or at least there traditional symbols).
click to enlarge genius.

I just recently finished this one (as of January). One of the things that I have really been thinking about is making graphic design that can be easily photocopied. Don't ask me why, artist's get weird things stuck in there heads. Maybe the challenge of only working in monochromatic positive and negative space appeals to me. Anyway, all of these elements are scanned drawings that have been inversed in photoshop. The only "computer generated" lines are the circles at the top and bottom. Man, this page messed a week of my life up.
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A new page!!! This is Chapter XIIII and as you can see I am continuing my pen and ink / color in photoshop approach. I decided to just go nuts with the cross hatching lines to build up mass in the clouds. This is obviously the famous beastie described in this Chapter. I knew I couldn't mess this one up.
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www.jymdavis.com undergoes updates

I have been updating my "official" website alot in the last month but I have finally settled on a satisfactory page. Check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks to friends for their feedback...you were very influential on what I put up and what I took off the site. Anyway, the digital art and the painting and drawing sections are the main changes so be sure to check 'em out.

"Nocturne" drawing...the movie and comic are coming along nicely. More on this later. And more on the Revelation project, I am falling behind but am still determined!
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Tiny red man in the woods hopes you have a nice Holiday season.
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again, not "Revelation" related but isn't this photo great? I can't take any credit for this one...Allison set up comp.
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This is a drawing I recently finished. It will be worked into Chapter X but I figured I would post the drawing by itself as well...it turned out alot better than I thought it would. It is of John / Ezekial eating a Bible as described in this Chapter...very vivid text. I used myself as the model but hopefully that is not too obvious.
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Probably Nothing Post Card
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This is Chapter 8...where the some major pain is really unleashed on terra firma. I really wanted to go with a more contemporary approach because this section of Revelation has such chilling repercussions for us 21st century folk. In fact, the russian word for "Wormwood" is Chernobyl...a translation that freaked quite a few Ruskies out during the cold war. I've actually spelled out Wormwood and Chernobyl in the upper right hand corner...the letters came from a sheet of printed paper that went haywire (I cut up the letters to make the words but the garbled effects are pretty much as they were). The exploding planets are stills from my pixel-vision fischer price toy camera...I love lo-fi equiptment.
click to enlarge genius.

I've been thinking about this page all summer. All of the elements are scanned in and the only "photoshoped" elements are the yellow and the red color of the wings. The wings refer to the first line of the text and "four angels" who bring some major hardships on the earth. I'm a little unsure about the bar codes but I like the idea of bringing in some modern elements. What do you guys think, more color?
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This is my design for Chapter VI. I thought I would push the Golden Ratio one last time. The smeary figures in the upper left are some more Durer prints from his famous 4 horsemen pages.
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Back from slumber

The blogitty blog is back from summer vacation...I am still working on the Revelation Book (I have 4 pages that are almost ready for posting) but as you can see I am also dividing my time with this "Nocturne" short film. The good news is that Allison and I filmed in Tennessee for one long night and day and we got some great footage. I set up the "sleep lab" in my parent's house and rolled the cameras for over 2 hours of material. The most exhilirating (and exhausting) filming was in the nearby woods. Locals driving by got to see a girl in a night gown running around in 100 degree humidity and a bearded creepy guy chasing her with a toy camera (me). And after all that we had to walk back home because my car battery died because I was using the headlights as a lighting source...now that is low budget filmmaking. Now I am dreading going through the 150 minutes of footage I plan to weed down to 15 minutes for the final short.

She is ready for her close-up, Mr. Demille.
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"Nocturne" film still.
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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).
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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!)
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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.
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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.
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