#postcreated Pride

[sysirauta]

Just quick sketch of Pride from a few years back.

[rachaelmayo]

This is commissioned art that I made for DeviantArt buddy Sysirauta. The character is their Postcreated entity called Pride, a shape-shifter of mercurial temperament and exquisite taste. Sysirauta wanted Pride to have a cup of coffee, but left the rest of the composition up to me. They provided excellent reference material, so managing all the twisty limb-tentacles, wings, fur, feathers, and metal was no problem!

In fact, I really had fun with this piece. It was challenging and refreshing, and I worked with a color palette I have not used before. I've been going through an artistic dry spell - I have plenty of ideas, but insufficient energy to do much with 'em. The Pride project managed to crowbar me out of that mindset to a great degree, and the art process is coming along more easily than it has in the last couple of years.

I made this with Prismacolor pencils.

[grandhotelabyss]

And for our audiovisual Monday, I just found this interview with Alan Moore on RT from only two months ago. I’ve been reading William Blake—working my way through the Norton Critical Edition, which contains the illuminated books in their entirety, with plenty of other odds and ends—and went looking to see if YouTube had Moore’s spoken-word performance about Blake, Angel Passage, which I’ve never seen anywhere in any format. But they only have the final track, where Moore declares of Blake, “It’s not enough to study or revere him, only be him,” about which I’m not entirely sure.[*] I have my un-Blakean side too. I’ve never seen an angel or summoned a demon. 

Why do occultists always summon demons, by the way? Do they also invite murderers and rapists to their homes on the material plane? If the one, why not the other? In truth, I went to Catholic school; I saw The Exorcist very early in life and then many, many times after that; so I will not be calling down the powers of the air. 

Anyway, esoteric Twitter microcelebrity Logo Daedalus recently complained that no one talks about James Joyce’s essay on Blake. But Richard Ellmann talked about it in his mammoth, landmark biography of Joyce, contextualizing it alongside its companion piece on Defoe. I wrote in my essay on Ellmann:

Synthesizing Defoe’s realism with Blake’s romanticism (“While he took pride in grounding his art like Defoe in fact, he insisted also with Blake on the mind’s supremacy over all it surveyed,” summarizes Ellmann), Joyce held that the artist’s duty was to transfigure truth in the crucible of his imagination and produce a new world out of this one. This act, which both preserves the world and inspires us to change it, which saves the was and incites the will be, what Stephen Dedalus calls “the postcreation,” cannot be achieved on the basis of mollifying lies or blunted language.

Realism and idealism, naturalism and symbolism—for that matter, Athens and Jerusalem. The identity of opposites held together by the sustaining tension of the artwork, the radiant force-field of aesthetics. 

What I find remarkable about the above interview with Moore is that exactly halfway through it, he gently repents having popularized the Guy Fawkes mask in V for Vendetta because, in his judgment, the anarchist hackers of Anonymous, who’d adopted it as their symbol of revolution, recklessly incited civil violence in the guise of liberation during the Arab Spring. 

Speaking as we were of Irishmen, I here thought not of Joyce, who tempered his Blakean idealism with Defoe’s realism, but of Yeats, who really was trying to be Blake; and as Blake at first hailed the revolutionary spirits of 1776 and 1789 in America: A Prophecy, so Yeats, in Cathleen ni Houlihan, dramatized the avatar of Ireland calling her sons to sacrifice themselves to free the captive land from the English, a bloody summons the poet would live to regret in “The Man and the Echo”:

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right. Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot?

Do these tragic lines—which I recall Christopher Hitchens applying to himself after a young soldier inspired by his writing was killed in Iraq—mitigate the writer’s responsibility? In his little book on Blake, the Christian apologist Chesterton, who appreciates Blake’s opposition to materialism but is contemptuous of his gnosticism, comments with bland irony,

like most of the men of genius of that age and school, like Coleridge and like Shelley, he seems to have been slightly sickened with the full sensational actuality of the French tragedy; and somewhat unreasonably having urged the rebels to fight, complained because they killed people.

Then again, Chesterton also says in an aside that “witches and warlocks” were “somewhat excusably” killed in European history, which returns us to the warlock Moore’s regrets. But he never portrays a successful political revolution in his work, only a mental and spiritual one. That’s probably as much as poets and artists should advocate, at least if they don’t want to “lie awake night after night.”

_________________________

[*] YouTube does have Moore’s older performance pieces, The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theater of Marvels, which sort of enacts his occult initiation, to include his summoning of the demon regent Asmodeus, and The Birth Caul, a Romantic autobiography occasioned by his mother’s death in a “strange hot year that stank of lioness,” and (like his first and second prose novels) a psychogeography of Northampton. I owned these two on CD 20 years ago, but who knows what became of those artifacts. Here is a complete guide to Moore’s spoken-word catalogue.

[sysirauta]

The metallic lantern head geometry bastard is 12 years today. At this point I've accepted that he is not going leave from my headspace likely ever.

This is a gouache painting on black paper that I painted a month ago.

[sysirauta]

Trying to draw something, so here are Pride and Envy as (my version of) kirins.

Kirins have clear sexual dimorphism but it worked well with them without needing to stretch my own rules. Bright colors and pure black are male-coded, so Pride would just be 'tall dude with oddly long tail and long horns'. And he would use that third horn like a knife. Envy is a mix of traits (bodyshape, pale color, visible tailtip and fangs are female-coded, bright colors, decorative feathers and third horn are male-coded). Scales and beard are neutral traits that just happen sometimes.

[sysirauta]

And here are all the guys [gender neutral].

Pride - Envy - Wrath - Greed - Sloth - Gluttony - Lust

[sysirauta]

Just Pride. The point of this was just that could I think any pose that I haven't drawn yet. This would work even if turned upside down.

[sysirauta]

Unholy Geometry

Geometric Pride just because.

(If tumblr view screws up resolution, try viewing this in my Sheezy.)

[sysirauta]

Lame joke from 2014 brought to you by some weird creature.

[sysirauta]

I'm Alive

Human!Pride from 2015, all lineart including background is traditional, slammed together digitally. Some details feel slightly out of date but I still like this.

[sysirauta]

So recently I commissioned a THING. This awesome OOAK art doll of Pride was made by @niicchan (her instagram account is far more active and full of neat crafts, click).

It is amazing that anybody would dare to make a 3D-Pride in the first place, due to all weird stuff like floating parts and tentacle limbs, so whole thing required some creative freedom but the results are great.

There's more and better photos of this thing in Niicchan's instagram post.

[sysirauta]

Self-reflect

I made a quick something to commemorate that exactly ten years ago this disaster creature decided to have a human iteration of himself, which (with the original creature) has been taking my headspace ever since.

[sysirauta]

Pride, but less metal monster and more a human.

[sysirauta]

Siebenfaches Seltsam / Sevenfold Strange

Pride from 2014 and here are his legs in their full weirdness.

[sysirauta]

Some more photos of Pride and Envy dolls which I commissioned. To my delight, I got an extra surprise of a tiny coffee mug and a tea cup, referring to these art things I made earlier. They also glow under UV-light, like that's pretty much spot on detail how they'd appear to be in the dark.

[sysirauta]

No drawing challenge without the sins.

Have Pride, drinking coffee. Holding the mug is freaky enough when you have lots of metal limbs.

That mug was originally in some random fanart I got years ago and I like it.