New Work

Last Friday I got to send a new work out to its new home. I always hate to let 'em go, and yet, am happy that my work has found a place in someone's life.

To the right is my newly completed painting "Sabi". It is a portrait of a Cheetah named Sabi, who had lived at the Living Desert until she passed away this spring. My painting is based on several photo's taken of her when she was a kitten.

Sabi was an ambassador for her species and for the zoo, appearing in the Wild Life Wonders show at the zoo, and making other public appearances.

Work continues on other pieces, and I took some incredible reference photo's of a number of birds of prey recently, which should lead to some memorable portraits in the near future.

Catching Up

As you may notice, there's been a lapse in my posts here. Not only have the last few months been hot outdoors and busy indoors, with several paintings all going at once, I haven't finished anything new to post about.

But now I've got some things to share.

First, I've opened a shop at CafePress.com, offering several of my paintings on gift items. I'm starting out small - just a few items, to see if there is any interest. You can check it out at: http://www.cafepress.com/darrsandberg

This little guy is now available on a coffee mug, a "hoodie" sweatjacket for kids, and t-shirts in sizes from toddler to kids large.

Just because someone is small, doesn't mean they are not formidable in their own way.

This portrait of a Fennec Fox, in addition to being available as a giclee print ($200 of which is a direct donation to the Living Desert), is now available on a generic white t-shirt, or a woman's scoop neck t-shirt, also in white.

And this painting of mine is now available on one of four dark colors of t-shirt - Navy blue, military green, brown and charcoal.

Not quite the opulent color palatte of a french chateau, but certainly in keeping with the spirit of the place.

Additionally, I've been asked to teach four art classes for The Living Desert as part of their Living Desert University program. LDU provides a wide-range of classes, on subjects from anthropology, botany and gardening to zoology. The arts program includes native handicraft classes, plein air workshops, and how-to courses. I'll be taking students on a plein air paint out to Pinyon Crest, and teaching three classes on art principles. And of course, there are many, many other worthwhile and fascinating classes offered as part of the LDU program, including some dangerously inspiration gardening classes - so I'll have a link here to the on-line class catalog as soon as it is available.

My portrait of the Arabian Sandcat is very close to finished, as is a small portrait of a cheetah kitten. Those should be done and posted both here and at my gallery site very soon. Every thing else is dawdling along in the summer heat.

Never enough irons in the fire

I tend to work on multiple pieces at the same time, and that is certainly the case these days.

Not only do I have the Cronus piece mentioned last week going, but there's a watercolor from a plein air day that needs finalizing, a view of the Seine that's half-way done, and my main project, a collection of twelve paintings inspired by The Living Desert, a desert-focused zoo and botanical garden in Palm Desert/Indian Wells, California (not affiliated or associated with Living Desert State Park or Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park in Carlsbad, New Mexico.)

I’ve completed two of the twelve paintings; a portrait of a Fennec Fox, and a landscape with Mexican Grey Wolves. There’s a giraffe portrait in progress, several landscapes, and a macro cactus flower composition that I’ve finally decided to abandon. It simply is not coming together. So I decided last Monday, to replace all three of the planned flower paintings, with either animals or landscapes.

Friday, I finally got some really good reference photo’s of the Sand Cats, so out with the stubborn cactus flower, in with these threatened, unique animals.

I’ve also been reading about Sir John Everett Millais. http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/online/featuredartists/millais/

Inaugural Post: Devoured and Devouring

I'm currently working on a piece inspired by Cronus, about those who abuse power, and the role that fears plays in feeding and sustaining such abuse. Later this evening, after my parrot has gone to bed and I have can a piece of peace and quiet, I plan on putting at least a more few hours of painting time to this work. After that, I'll be updating the page linked above. If you noticed, I've posted a black-white sketch of the general composition of this painting, and have started posting on top of that sketch, pieces of passages that I'm working on. I'll continue to add pieces as the piece progresses, and over time, viewers can see the painting develop.

The piece started when I came across Goya's "Saturn Devouring his Son" (to the right) again about a year ago. When I first saw it in middle school, it was a cool-scary mythology painting. All these years later, I saw the archetypical paternalistic leader, devoured by fear from within, devouring that which it was his duty to nurture.

In the decades since middle school, how many times have such devouring leaders arisen, consumed their people in one form or another, and been over-thrown or replaced?

One of the things that really jumped out at me regarding the Uranus-Cronus-Zeus genealogy was the cyclical nature. Each father-figure in turn attempts to secure his dominion in perpetuity by swallowing up the next generation, a pattern that Zeus continued briefly.

It mirrors, if not directly mythologizes, a very common fear in human societies - the fear of being supplanted or replaced by the future - future generations, future religions, future idealogies, future governments.

In the event of the last decade, we've witnessed the fall of one domineering father type leader, who had endeavored to restore the glory of an ancient empire, at the orders of a similar leader also endeavoring to reclaim the glory of a more recent idealogical empire. Both have consumed metaphorically whatever was perceived by them as presenting a potential opposition.

There were examples of this cycle of fear and consuming in the decade prior, and the decade before that, and so on back to the very birth of the story of Uranus, Cronus and Zeus.

Fitting with in all this, the meme' of 'revolutions devour their children'. Post WWII revolutions devoured the children of the nation's involved, reactions to those revolutions devoured the children of reacting nations. The Industrial revolution devoured its own children, the Information revolution devoured its children.

I have wondered, since I starteded looking at this myth and its parallels to our times, if this is a pattern written into humanity itself, all but inescapable. Under it, collectively the individual fears of fathers of being replaced in society by their sons and mothers replaced by their daughters, become the fears of entire generations being replaced and made irrelevant, growing into a fear of entire religions and value systems and idealogies being discarded for the next generation of belief. Perhaps the reason why Psychoanalytic theories of Oedipal and Elektral complexes produce so little value, is that the real heart of the myths of Oedipus and Elektra is one generation's fear of being replaced, of dying.

One last thought for today.

This cycle of being devoured and devouring is one founded, at the core, on fear of death, mortality. Though the world is as pregnant as Gaea before Cronus's castration with religions that endeavor to scour away the finality from death,

what does it mean for us about our many faiths that our societies are still trapped in this cycle of fear and devouring?