Milkhare / Sacrifice / Portent

I started thinking about witchcraft. It started the same way as anything else, it just bubbled up to the surface at some point when I wasn’t paying attention. It might have had its seed in a show I signed on for at Haven Gallery, a show themed for folklore, and so I had to fit something into that. It was sneaky and so I don’t recall the actual beginning, just the point when it had taken hold. I only noticed once I was reading about the various poisons associated with western witches, the plants that they used to kill and to create dark magic like nightshade, mandrake and fly agaric mushrooms, the creatures they worked through like hares and goats. The pieces are three separate aspects of musing about witchcraft, about trying to cajole order out of confusion, looking for a system.

A milkhare is a manifestation of a witch, a familiar they would use to steal milk from farmers. The hare drinks the milk and returns it to the witch. I’m not certain why the concept is so fascinating, but I find it deeply troubling. Maybe it’s easy for me to relate to the concept of darkness and uncertainty all around, that odd and awful things are happening and there must be some culprit. But who’s to blame? The outsider? Maybe there really is a monster out there beyond the pale, living in the dark woods. Anecdote and superstition substituting for fact and reason still seems to be our standard mode of operation and it doesn’t seem to have changed much over the past several hundred years. It’s disheartening.

Sacrifice is a curio to make sense of the disordered world. Surely death, blood and poison can help me through this maze. Sometimes I let the strangeness pour out and I try to hang logical sense on it later. Sometimes there doesn’t seem to be any reason or sense to be had. This seems like one of those times.

A lot of mourning doves live around my house. I end up putting them in paintings just because I see so much of them. I know that they’re just living their lives, near the neighbor’s bird feeder, but it’s easy to pin something more on them, on their sad songs and watching eyes. They’re always watching, always. Portent is about a clinging sense of dread. I don’t generally have what I’d call a hopeful outlook on the world, and the last several years feel even darker. The black goat is calm and still and grows an extra horn. The birds are carrying poison and the horns are tangled in string and hung with more nightshade. It’s uncertain. I’m uncertain. It feels calm and quiet and humming with unease all at the same time. If only I could figure out what they’re trying to tell me, maybe then I could navigate safely.

Dutch Masterpieces at the Met

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of art the other day with my friend who was visiting from California. They were showing their entire collection of 17th century oil paintings by the Dutch Masters, Rembrandt, Vermeer, the 27 or so students of Rembrandt, you know, all of those guys (and one lady). It was a show that I knew I wanted to see but was unlikely to attend on my own. Lucky for me hangovers made for a slow start to the day, and when my friend suggested we go to the MOMA I was able to inform him that “oh no, the MOMA closes in an hour, but there’s something at the Met that looks good…” All kidding and mind games aside, the show was phenomenal. I’m not going to post any images of the paintings because I didn’t take any pictures of the paintings. I’m generally of the mindset that tiny photos of masterful works don’t help anyone, especially the famous ones that you can just find on the internet anyway. This might make me a hypocrite as I constantly post tiny photos of my own paintings on the internet, but that’s beside the point here. I wanted to simply stand in front of these paintings, to see how they worked through the problems, to wonder about their lives, and yes, to silently judge them. I realize that this last bit is insanity. These men (and one lady), were painters of the highest skill level, craftsmen at the top of their games, even the ones you’ve never heard of before. But somehow, somewhere, in a most uncharacteristic self-confident fashion, a tiny voice in my head kept nagging at me “you can paint like that.. you can do clouds better than that… that composition is flawed…that hand isn’t that well done…” Again, I realize that this is utter insanity. That not only do I have the advantage of photo references and zooming in and electric lights and pre-tubed paint and not worrying about cholera, I still struggle with color and form and composition, and a lot of my clouds come out looking like shit. They had to stand outside and paint cloud studies and bring them back into their studio to use as reference, or just try to remember what a cloud looks like. Not easy. And don’t get me wrong, 95% of the time I was standing there, I was simply marveling at the use of light and form and color and composition. But weirdly, I left feeling confident, like a solid painter in my own right, and that is such a rare feeling, if I’m being really honest. So I’m not certain what happened, or even if there’s a moral to this story, other than go to see the paintings that you know really do it for you. See them in person if and when you can. Stand quietly in front of them and don’t take selfies or photos because that really just makes you a fucking dummy. Stand there and marvel, and wonder about the life of the painter and watch how their mind works.

desire / in the house of the bear

I always think about California. I can honestly say I think about California every single day. I was thinking about the drought, and then about the fires, and I was trying to figure out how to put the bear into that situation.  It wasn’t my initial intention, but I ended up making a version of the Californian flag. I guess the idea was both to personalize and take a wider view of that place that I spend so much time thinking about. I gorge myself on the ideal of my life when I was there, of what it would be like if I went back. The empty bottles are for the drought, but they’re also for the empty things that I put into myself, the poisons all around us, the physical ones and the psychological ones. The poppies aren’t even the right type to really take away pain and suffering, they’re like a shadow or a ghost of their cousin. There’s uncertainty and doom all around. 

Desire is making eye contact because it’s the condition, the emotion, it’s looking at you, it wants, it’s hungry, it endlessly needs. In the House of the Bear looks away, because it’s me succumbing to the condition of desire. I’m incapable or unwilling to look at you, or I just don’t give a fuck. The fires are coming, the end is at hand, there’s nothing around to fix it, the water’s all gone. All the suffering comes from want, and often a want that I can’t identify, which only makes it more frustrating. Desire is eating an empty bottle and a flower that doesn’t help me.

If you’re interested in owning either of these paintings, contact me HERE.

latracalia

I have a very Spanish Catholic Church in my neighborhood that still does processions through the streets. One of them involved rose petals which were all over the ground one day and I knew that I wanted to work that into a painting. I started thinking about Valentine’s and the use of rose petals to signify the visitation of the Holy Spirit which led me to learn about Lupercalia which got me thinking about sacrifice and moving out of a dark place into something more hopeful, and the ways the western world has traditionally practiced that concept in organized rituals. This painting is called “Latracalia” because I’m using coyotes instead of wolves. I like coyotes for this role as they’re very successful despite people vilifying and killing them. I guess that happens with wolves too, but to a lesser extent, and they’re not quite as tenacious and successful despite it all.

So really the painting is about attempting to move from a dark place into a more hopeful one, even though it often involves ugly, violent, dark, burning, sad weirdness and cobbling together concepts and rituals from whatever broken bits are at hand. A kind of any means necessary. In other words positive change is difficult and doesn’t always pan out, but it’s still worth trying.

You can buy a print of this painting here - www.houseofroulx.com