Night in the Forest of the Blue Gates

This one needs a scary new age soundtrack.

I really don't know where this piece came from.  It started as something completely different and turned into this strange dark forest very suddenly.  I'm still not sure what to make of it.  Such a strange vibe.  I know that the period that this came from was very intense and uncomfortable for me.

It feels like underneath.  Some contained underworld place that is difficult to escape.  I definitely don't want to get too close to those columns, they look hungry.

As well as the scary new age soundtrack, I also hear the hum of a dying fluorescent bulb here.  I suspect that light in the Forest of the Blue Gates flickers.  As soundtracks go - perhaps Steve Roach: Dynamic Stillness.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}

Melek Taus

This piece makes me think of  Melek Taus but also a bit of Shiva.  The night I was working on this was just before all the intense tornadoes and storms in Alabama.  I know that Shiva has associations with weather, I'm not sure about Melek Taus.  Some connections here with the Feri Tradition's Blue God.  Also, please see my post on Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This piece and the one in that post were created from the same source material, but went different directions.  This one has a softer feel and a perhaps is a little more balanced overall.

I struggle with pieces of this nature, because I often want to give the work more detail and make the image I see clearer, but the whole point of this kind of artwork is that it is supposed to be vague on a certain level.  Much digital art is focused on being overly rendered and having every single bit detailed.   This kind of art is meant to imply or evoke the image that the viewer sees. 

When confronted with visual ambiguity, the imagination is forced to fill in the gaps.  Due to that ambiguity, each person that sees the piece gets a different view of it, thus everyone sees their own individual piece of art.  There are of course bits that everyone will acknowledge as an eye or mouth or hair, but the kind of eye or mouth that each person sees subtly changes the overall meaning of the piece.  The vague boundaries between these things opens the piece up to greater interpretations of meaning, expanding the piece beyond being a single image with a single meaning.  Suddenly, out of one piece of art you can get fifty different pieces.  This is no excuse for laziness or poor craftsmanship though.  There ARE images within the piece, but their boundaries have been overlapped and blurred to let greater meaning in.

Part of the joy of this kind of art for me is the discovery.  I will often spend hours developing the image until I uncover its inner core.  With particularly stubborn pieces, I will have to leave and return later to try again.  Sometimes though, it is like breathing: just letting the air in.  The image is already waiting.  I just have to pick up pen, pencil, or mouse and let it happen.

{Digital images manipulated in Photoshop}