Color scales

Color scales

Originally uploaded by anselm23

I’m went down to New Haven to visit the Eli Whitney Museum for the first time today. My God. There were not so many miracles accomplished in the carpentry shop of Jesus of Nazareth as in the carpentry shop there.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about color. The Eli Whitney is near a place where I can buy acrylic paint in these small tubes, so I double-checked my current paint supply against the Golden Dawn color scales this morning, with an eye to filling in the absent bits with a few tubes that would fill in the missing places in my schema. I wanted to do some more work on the Kavad today.

I got my paint, but I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to work on the kavad. The Eli Whitney Museum was amazing, and it’s probably worth a visit all its own if you’re a maker and happen to be in Connecticut.

Via Flickr:
The Golden Dawn (English magical society, not Greek fascist party) developed a system of color magic that I’ve been eager to incorporate into the kavad. It’s one thing to be able to produce the color mentally. It’s quite another to produce them from tubes of paint and have the painted colors match the intended reality. Not easy.

There are four Golden Dawn color scales. Each scale is named after a court card in the Tarot: king, queen, prince and princess. There are ten basic shades or hues in each scale, and an additional twenty-two colors in each scale. So … thirty-two colors in each scale, times four. A lot of overlaps, yes… but in essence, 128 hues to work with, each with its own rules and correspondences.

20th Mansion of the Moon

20th Mansion of the Moon

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
Today is actually the 21st mansion. But I wanted the 20th mansion in kids’ notes. Plus, I brought notes about the 20th mansion to school today, and didn’t double-check my astrology program until I got to school. Oops.

Also, the planetary correspondences are wrong: The arrow "has the nature of Mars and the Moon," while the bow itself has the nature of "Mars and Jupiter." I read a promo for a book called Planet Narnia yesterday, which suggests that the Narnian Chronicles are in fact a thematic investigation of how Christology plays out through the seven heavens. Now I want to re-read the books, and play with those ideas myself.

17th mansion of the moon

17th mansion of the moon
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
As my journal entry indicated this morning, I didn’t have an easy time getting up this morning.

Fortunately, the Great Ape of the 17th mansion of the moon was on my class’s whiteboard for most of the day, right next to the Latin homework. And he made people really happy. He was funny and cool, and distracting in the right ways, and he brought us a laugh and helped reverse the bad luck which began the day.

My kids’ artistic abilities are increasing, too.

Oh, and I also responded to a *sigh* from a girl who thinks my artwork is ‘good’. I showed her and the rest of her class my ‘secret’, which is that I do a lot of borrowing of illustrations. This guy is my poor/intermediate effort to create a version of this drawing, which is as useful an image of the Mansion that I know of. Sometimes we learn the art of making art by growing our own vision, and sometimes through a borrowing.

12th mansion – man fighting dragon

12th mansion – man fighting dragon

Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
The Twelfth Mansion of the Moon, covering late Libra to early Virgo, gives prosperity to harvests and plantations but hinders sailors; and it is good for the betterment of servants, captives and companions.

I think this has to do with friendship. A man who fights dragons needs helpers and friends, and frankly, I need more friends in my life. I know lots of people, I help lots of people, but everybody needs a crew — and I’m of an age where a crew would be helpful. I’m also working on a lot of projects where I need to complete the harvest. So do my students — they need the opportunity to complete what they’ve begun. So, for all these reasons, this was the illuminated image they worked on today.

Again, deeply indebted to Chris Warnock for the book, the Mansions of the Moon

Drawing for Soldiers

Javier’s Lion

I just ran into a soldier, a former Marine, while picking up more art supplies today. We were both in Michael’s, and arts and craft supply store near New Haven.  Javier was apparently wounded in Iraq, when a bullet shattered his helmet. For an hour, the corpsman thought he was dead. In an effort to avoid traumatizing Javier’s unit, the corpsman left his helmet on and left him with other corpses of the men in their unit. An hour later when Javier regained consciousness, he found his men trying to remove his boots. He said to them “hey these are my boots, not yours.” He was evacuated to a hospital. But, although he had been knocked out for an hour, there were only superficial wounds on his head.Damage to his brain seem to be minimal. He was given some stitches, and sent back to the front lines a few days after his “lucky break.”

But all was not well in Javier’s mind. While leading his team through a building, Javier discovered, to his dismay, that he had forgotten how to walk down stairs, or use the hand signals that Marines are trained to use to communicate silently. He tumbled down a flight of steps hitting his head several times on the way down. His team gradually discovered other weaknesses that were real liability on the battlefield. Javier had forgotten the words to common objects like rifle and helmet and “open fire”, which definitely got in the way of being able to be an effective team leader. Whole classes of words were simply absent from his memory, like book and friend. He was released from active duty service and sent home to recuperate in a VA hospital.

About a week ago, apparently, Javier discovered that he has drawing abilities — abilities he never had before. When he draws pictures of things, words associated with those things gradually return to him. Accordingly, his therapist at the VA hospital have recommended a course of drawing to him, as a way of restoring his memory of words, at his awareness of himself. He says as well that he can only write clearly after he has drawn for a while, and thus the concussion has left his speech impaired but the more that he draws the faster his speech improves, and the more vocabulary returns.

I did not find all this out right away, and I may have a few details wrong, of course.  The conversation was wonderful, but complicated because — although I’ve presented it linearly here, the tale came in fits and spurts there. Javier originally asked me where to find rulers. He was learning to practice drawing straight edges. I showed him where I had gotten the ruler in my hand. But another person in the store had just asked me about paper, and I was explaining to this other student what the difference was between watercolor paper, dry media paper and Bristol board. Javier came up behind me to listen to what I had to say. Then he  decided that I was an artist, based on how I spoke to the young man taking his first drawing class.

Javier asked a lot of questions, and I answered with as much clarity and confidence as I could. We talked about the differences between various kinds of paper, various drawing tools, and methods of improving one’s drawing skills rapidly. Javier seemed to be highly motivated. Recovering his full speaking skills seems to be high on his list of priorities, and learning to draw seems to be the only way he can find to get there. I found him the notebook and a couple of guidebooks to help him get started in his practice, and I also found some tools which helped me get started, but mostly it was about talking, and giving him some confidence in his artistic abilities. Along the way he told me his story, which I find to be extraordinary.

It occurs to me that we will be seeing a lot more of this, these incredibly difficult brain injuries. Think: this man had a position, presumably a fire-team leader or a sergeant’s billet, and authority and competence. And suddenly he’s having a lot of difficulty communicating anything to anyone, and he can’t even go down stairs without losing his balance.  And here he is, at home, recuperating from this injury that in another war might have splattered his brains all over foreign soil.

I’m glad he’s alive.  Before we parted, I saluted him for his service to this country, and I shook his hand as a fellow artist.

Oh, and I gave him this card with the attached illustration, which I happened to have in my pocket from earlier in the day.  It shows the Tenth Mansion of the Moon, Al-Jabbah “The Mane”.  It is the lion above the city and the river, and it’s a symbol for good fortune and success and achievement, etc, etc..  So, Javier, if you should stumble across this blog, you’ll know it was me and you that I’m talking about here. If you do, my apologies for telling your story. In the meantime, may success come to you, and may the good fortune of the sign of Al-Jabbah find you and your fellow comrades in concussion-recovery.

***

While we were in the Drawing supplies section of Michael’s, I explained to him the following art exercise:

1. Get a notebook with plain (i.e., unlined) pages
2. Every day, mark off a part of each page with a box or a shape of some kind: a quarter of a page, a half-page, even the whole page.
3. Put the date on that page
4. Create a piece of art that fills that box.
5. Don’t erase any of your lines (ink is best)
6. Fill the rest of the page with a journal entry describing what you did.
7. You can do more than one page a day, but always art.
8. Get the bad and awkward art out of your system, one page at a time.

The rest of your artwork, of course, will gradually improve, because you are practicing the pen-work and the composition skills that you need to be a visual artist.  And if you’re copying out poetry and other texts (a nod to the “Wise”), the use of the images on the pages will help you learn and remember the poetry through the positioning of the artwork.

Progress on the Sons of Zeus

Dioscuri poems & icons
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Back a number of years ago now, my Father and I visited Sicily. One of the places that we both had a deep reaction to was Agrigento — in ancient times the city of Akragas, called by Pindar “the most beautiful city of the mortals.” About a mile inland from the sea, the southern edge of the city served as the acropolis, where a high cliff was edged with temples.

One of the temples that resonated deeply with me was that of the Dioscuri, the Sons of Thunder or the Sons of Zeus, Castor and Polydeuces (more commonly known as Pollux). These are the twins of the constellation of Gemini, and it turned out that, on the day we visited these ruined temple complexes, that it was the anniversary of my grandmother’s death, and we saw a double rainbow, AND we were staying in the Dioscuri Hotel facing Dioscuri Bay. My father and I came back to the hotel. I was drunker than I’d ever been before in my life, and probably never again, in the middle of a Mediterranean March thunder-and-rainstorm, and I said to myself, “this is Dioscuri weather!”

Shortly after we made it back to the hotel, the sky cleared enough that we could go outside, and see the Dioscuri stars, Castor and Pollux, glimmering in the night sky. Out across the water, we could see the lights on some huge container ship glimmering, and there was a moon in the sky, as well.

The Dioscuri were not just protectors of horses and shipmen, as the Homeric Hymn recorded here documents. They were also (later) identified with Sts. Cosmas and Damien of early Christianity — holy men who took the form of physicians, and went house to house curing the sick for free. Their feast day was/is October 25, and I’m thinking I’d like to do something in their honor. In particular, I’d like to finish this pair of pages to them, with images of them an all, and work them into the Kavad somewhere. In the meantime, maybe you, my readers, can think how we can honor this divine pair, and restore some of their ancient honor and celebrity.

Islamic tile pattern

Islamic tile pattern
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

This one photo in my Flickr feed was viewed over a thousand times today. I think it must have been some sort of a bot, because I can’t imagine that many people being interested in such a photo. Still, it was pretty incredible to go from under 100 views of my photos yesterday to almost 2000 today. Enjoy the image!