Here's my tribute to the ancient Picts . . . in fantasy and fact.
Robert E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn is a heroic figure, the last king of the vanishing Pictish race, beset on all sides by Romans, Norse, Britons, and even Irish reivers there in the lands of Caledonia and the Scottish--Pictish!--isles north of the Roman Wall, Hadrian's boundary and the mark of Pax Romana like the mark, the brand, burned into the skin of Britannia. How the ancient goddesses of land and sea must have howled and keened.
Of course, Howard got the history quite wrong--as even he admitted--but the mythic outlines hold, have branded my mind. Frazetta's cover for the Ace paperback Bran Mak Morn helped hold this tale, these characters, this tribe or race of human creatures in my mind.
Despite Howard, I link the Pictish tribes to the Celtic in my veins, to the ink in my skin, but that's fantasy and wayward at that. Still. Bran Mak Morn is a name of portent and import to me. "Worms of the Earth" is a favorite tale. Caledonia a land in the mists. (Listen to Dougie Maclean's "Caledonia," and you can travel there on the wings of song.)
This fellow is a rough gestural piece, shaped in a 20-minute session with a model, a mere exercise, that I later pit-fired. The beaten copper ornaments seem fitting, as does the stone and ivy/weed setting.
