New artwork: I Am a Child of God V. A reference to the Primary song. The rectangles represent (bottom to top), a child, its mortal parents, and our Heavenly Parents. (Figured it was time to do a more abstract version of this idea. It ended up also alluding to Hearts of the Children IV and Hearts of the Children V.)
My process for this style, for what it’s worth: mock up the design in Figma, export an SVG, open it in Inkscape, use the roughen and simplify filters, export a PNG, open it in Procreate, select the rectangles, paint the streaks within the rectangles, export a PNG, texture in Affinity Photo as usual.
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (1992). I’d say this is dark academia, though there’s not actually much schoolwork in it. The story was compelling and uncomfortable, like watching a train wreck. Here and there I felt like I myself was the one who had committed murder (which is how I felt when I read Crime & Punishment). The mountain part kept reminding me of my dad’s suicide in the mountains and the subsequent manhunt. On a happier note, the side of me that almost became a classicist enjoyed the occasional Greek and Latin. I wish there had been a lot more of that.
What Moves the Dead, by T. Kingfisher (2022). A creepy novella based on Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (which I haven’t yet read). Enjoyed it, especially the mycological angle, which reminded me a bit of VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Borne.
Happy to announce that I have a piece of art recently published in Wayfare issue 2. It’s based on my illustration that accompanies Jennifer Finlayson-Fife’s chapter in In the Image of Our Heavenly Parents on celebrating each other’s strengths (chapter 2).
I also made an alternate version that we didn’t end up running for space reasons:
New artwork: Deliverance to the Captives. (If I’d known that all I needed to do to get through that art block was to blog about it, I would have written yesterday’s post weeks ago!)
For the past couple months I’ve been wrangling some artist’s block. (Thus the lack of new work.) I’ve come up with a decent number of ideas, but whenever I start working on one, it begins to rot and slough off before my inner eye. (Uncomfortably visceral metaphor in preparation for Halloween: check.)
I hope I’m near the end of this particular hiatus, but part of me can’t help but wonder if I’ve stumbled into the final block, the one that never goes away, the end of making art for me. And yes, I wonder this every time I get blocked. A precarious path, this is.
I see myself as building a corpus of work, not as guaranteeing a constant stream of new things. I care about stock; flow is incidental. So in a sense I’m okay with projects coming to an end (as we’ve seen with Mormon Artist, Mormon Texts Project, etc.). I’m a seasonal maker. And perhaps this season — the artmaking one — has concluded, making way for something else, something new.
But maybe it isn’t over yet. Maybe I just need to work harder and push through the block like a professional. Or maybe I need to change style or process or subject. Or maybe all I need is another month off to let my brain finish recharging or healing or whatever it does in these fallow periods.
Ways of Being, by James Bridle (2022). Wow, what a fascinating book. Loved it. It’s nominally about artificial intelligence but (to me, anyway) it was much more about other types of intelligence in the world — animals, plants, etc. Things like plants being able to hear and remember and move around (at a population level, anyway), early hominids, Archaea, bee swarms, and esoteric programming languages. One of the most interesting books I’ve read in a while. The point about corporations being a form of artificial intelligence has especially stuck with me. Recommended.
Cage of Souls, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2019). I’d heard good things about this, and for me it delivered. Really liked it. Some very interesting ideas (including a few I wish had been explored in much more detail). More variety in the story than I was expecting after the first few chapters, too. A compelling read.
