Descent

Finished this painting entitled "Descent" today. It started out to be a different painting than it turned out to be. I started experimenting with it after I got started. The Christ figure is an outline of Gruenwald's Crucifixion that was painted, rubbed off, and drastically altered. I added the flames of Hell below in that the cruciform Christ seemed to be falling through the middle of the cross. "Descent" is a double reference to Christ's "descent" from the cross and the Christian doctrine of Christ's "descent" to Hell. The photo is a bit darker than the painting itself.

Dog Gone: Theodicy in Microcosm

Finished another disturbing drawing in my series "Theodicy in Microcosm."

Holy Cow! Theodicy in Microcosm

Finished an ink drawing in a series I have started called "Theodicy in microcosm" (First drawing: http://leosart.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/gods-eye-is-on-the-sparrow/). Theodicy literally means "God's justice." It is the problem or defense of the goodness and omnipotence of God in the presence of moral or natural evil and suffering. The primary question of theodicy might be something like this: If God is all powerful, in control, and perfect in goodness and love, then why is there evil in the world? Theodicy is most often about philosophical arguments in defense of God than it is about getting down to the real nitty gritty of human suffering and pain.

The problem of suffering and evil usually is presented on a grand, universal, often abstract, or macrocosmic scale, such as human pain, disease, death, violence, poverty, hunger, war. My ink drawings will present the problem of suffering and death on a close-up, small, individual or microcosmic scale among the animal kingdom, which points to the human realm.

My first drawing came to be after contemplating a dead bird in a parking lot and simply asking "Why?" That drawing was a way to memorialize that moment, that bird, along with that particular question. These series of stark, and ugly ink drawings will be my indirect or angular way of asking the question about a more macrocosmic theodicy.

Saint Frank: Halo series

Finished another in my series of halo pencil drawings.

Emek: The Thinking Person's Poster

Just bought the book Emek: The Thinking Man's Poster (top photo). It displays the best of almost 20 years of his hand drawn rock posters. Emek, like another popular poster artist Gary Houston of Voodoo Catbox, lives in Portland, Oregon, where I live. Many of his posters exhibit socio-political as well as pop culture themes, a blending of the organic and mechanical, and of course skeletons.