Wizard Locks

12/8/15
Two years ago, but still relevant.
A favorite profile pic.
I look my age, and that's not always easy to accept.

You'll find out, my young friends.
MD

Autumn Dreams

Gemini, Sleeping--A Mask: sculpture mix; denim, transparent brown, and clear glazing, layered.

Photo: August 10th, 2012.

In the Footsteps of the Legions

On Hadrian's Wall.
I'd been looking forward to this moment for almost my whole life.

As a boy, in my daydreams, I would walk that wall as a Roman, guarding the border, guarding the Empire . . .
Or, also as that boy, daydreaming, I'd climb and cross that wall as a Celt or Pict, seeking to drive away the invaders . . . .

Aquaman

Aquaman, Aquamatt:
2015 version.

Rough Duty in Roman-Britain: A Good Read

Pictish Warrior?

I've decked out my clay mask (Autumn/Winter) with a leather medieval helmet and a plaid muffler --for the fun of it.

New Mask: The Painted Man

The Painted Man (Math-theow): 
sculpture mix; denim, stormy blue, green, and transparent brown glazing, layered; leather strip.

Foreground: The Pict

Background: The Merman's Head.

Alternative titles: Not Hadrian; Deep in Thought; or The Painted Man's Grasp.

The Thinker(s): Orkney-Style?

My Pict (pit-fired clay; hammered copper) --

with someone else's Thor in the background.

I must say that my own sense of the Orkneys comes, chiefly, from Dorothy Dunnett's treatment of those fabulous northern islands in her King Hereafter, that wonderful historical novel of Thorfinn of Orkney, of Macbeth, and of the Celtic/Pictish/Norse mixture that infused those islands.  Seamus Heaney's brief references in his North, the poetry of Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, Henry Treece's historical novel Splintered Sword, the classic Orkneyinga Saga, and R. E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn have also informed my imagination here.   

Unfortunately, I've yet to experience Orkney for myself, though I expect to visit in the next decade or so.

Thor as thinker?  More than you might think, surely.  Check the Eddas.

Fall Begins

 Tumbler (Pictish): sculpture mix; pit-fired
. . . years and years ago on Ocean Beach.

Live model: 20-minute gestural exercise.

Reprise: The PIct

Pit-fired: sculpture mix; copper wire, flattened.
20-minute figure exercise with model.

The Pict

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.