The Cyclus Collection
If you've seen my work before (and if not, hey. Welcome. Hope you enjoy the ride), you've probably realized a couple things by now. First, I really like drawing animals in general and birds in particular. Second, I try to put a bit of meaning and a story into most pieces. However, I rarely go deep into what's behind a given piece. This is me trying to shed some light on my thought process while I conceived, painted and refined the pieces in this collection. I hope it is somewhat useful, a bit fun, and mostly readable. And if you get to the end and you have any questions, comments, praise or critiques, let me hear them. Just send me a message here.
So, what is this collection about? The theme across the three prints and the story they want to tell is the cyclic nature of... well, life. I hope this doesn't come across as utterly pompous (just a bit pompous is ok, tho) but I really like thinking about the whole birth-life-death thing as the turning of a wheel or a cycle through a spiral. I don't remember what happened before and still don't know what comes after, but I like thinking there's some order and pattern to the whole thing.
In this context, the name itself, Cyclus, is pretty self-explanatory. The idea of cycles, paths and loops is present in each print, and when you look at the chrysalis/moth across them all, you can see it moving along its own path and journey.
Now, let's take a look at the three prints in the collection:
Ortus
... This is where we start. Birthed from the humming of an atomic sun, where this golden thing that will be us is forged and crushed and distilled into a single, jewelled blood cocoon, waiting for the right time, the right breath, the right shape to be born into. This is where we start.
Storks... storks have a fascinating presence in our collective culture. For some reason (maybe because they're white and white is cool and heavenly and pure and mystic,) lots of cultures have assigned heavy meanings to storks. In Ancient Egypt, they were tied to the representation of the "ba," the soul. Greeks and Romans made them the ideal image of a good child since they thought storks cared for their old parents, feeding and carrying them when they could not fly anymore. And of course, we have the more modern, better-known legend of storks bringing babies into the homes of willing parents by way of dropping them down the chimney. Lovely. And a lot of responsibility for the bird, let me tell you.
Having read Hans Christian Andersen when I was little, that bond between storks and birth is the one that's deeply ingrained within me. So, when I started thinking about this whole birth-life-death cycle, it only made sense to use a stork for the first print. Also, what can I say? I like white birds. :)
Now, to make the theme more evident (or on the nose; the jury is still out on that one), I had to add an avatar for us, the talking biped, the cunning ape, the human thing that's the protagonist of the tiny, eternal story that unfolds across the three pieces. And that's where the chrysalis comes into play. It's the black (red) box within which the essence of a being takes shape before emerging into the world. What will come out of it? Heck if I know! Even the stork seems to be curious about it.
But while it comes out, it's held with care by the protective stork against the backdrop of... red, squiggly, weird lines emanating from a white disk?
That, folks, is the final actor in the play. We have the tiny human, the powerful archetype of the birth protector and beyond and above them, we have What Is. The Force. The Goddess. However you wanna call it, it's the source and the end. Aleph and Omega. Loving and ultimately indifferent about its children's games, like most parents. Starting the machine and watching it move along the path, waiting for it at the end of the journey, eager to hear the stories of what it saw along the way.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. That's for Obitus, the third one. For now, let's move forward into life:
Cyclus
This is where we walk. Or run, or slither, or try to fly beyond our scaly prison of fears and habits. Of never-ending, tail-eating patterns of light and dark. This is where we live, or where we try to, as we also try to fill every moment with a meaning, every day with a goal, every purse with a coin or two. All this because we've forgotten one simple fact: snakes are tied to the ground. But we... well, we have wings.
This is the second piece in the series and probably the more straightforward one. Here we have a couple snakes, and snakes... oh boy, snakes are a bag full of symbols and meanings, living inside one scaly hide.
Historically, snakes have been tied to meanings of death, protection, and rebirth. They also have been representations of both good and evil. They are venom and medicine and have been coiling around, under or within the branches of various "Tree of Life" kinda things across a handful of mythologies.
Of course, here we have not one, but two snakes, one light, one dark, tied in a dance, forever pursuing each other's tail. That kind of dual Ouroboros takes the shape of a couple number 8s (in numerology, 8 is "The achiever," measuring life by the goals it conquers.) And if you squint, you may also find a couple infinity symbols in there. An endless dance, graceful and balanced, destined to always be moving and rarely getting anywhere.
And within its coils, there's the moth, the avatar. The thing that came out of the chrysalis to flap its wings and see and conquer it all, just to realize that the hardest thing to see and conquer was within.
A couple notes and a question: first, the notion that, in biology, the thing that comes out of a chrysalis, the final stage in the metamorphosis, is called the imago. In psychoanalysis, the imago is "the idealized image of another person or the self." That makes our moth a great concept and shorthand to use here.
The second note is just to cover my own ass in case there's an entomologist around: the winged critter I painted here is loosely based on a moth, and moths come out of cocoons, not chrysalis. But a shiny, hard chrysalis is visually way more appealing than a fuzzy clump of silk in the shape of a chubby cigar, so I took a bit of an artistic/scientific license. :)
Oh yeah, the question! What's with the eyes on the imago's wings? What's with them, indeed?
Obitus
Is this where we end? Tired and white, after a twisting lifetime, wandering into the frost under a black star? In that last moment, as we avoid the maw of the Eater-of-Bones, we go back to the source. To feed the ghost reactor and prepare once more to be forged, crushed, distilled. Born.
Because we never end. We just get refactored and start over again.
This last piece is, in a sense, a mirror image of the first. We also have a bird, our avatar and What Is. But the setting is different, and the actors are, too.
First, the easy one. The imago here is near the end of its cycle. No longer fiery red, it's now white and a bit ashy, tiredly flying... where? Towards the dark sun above? or away from the hungry beak of... hey, what is that thing anyway?
Well, that thing is a bearded vulture. And bearded vultures are really freaking hardcore birds. They are the only flying vertebrates fully designed to survive by eating bones. They don't kill the living but feast on the already dead. And even tho they're always tied to that bit of morbid lore, they're considered symbols of good luck and happiness in some mythologies and were also a preferred bird of ornithomancers, soothsayers of old, who used bird entrails to foresee the future.
Whatever the meaning you want to assign to our bird and whatever its motivation, it serves here as a counterpart to the nurturing stork. It clearly does not have the best intentions towards our tired imago. It wants it to stop fighting, to stop trying to go higher and just... surrender. To go into the light and, after all, is it not tired of a lifetime of effort and struggle? Come here and rest, it says. Come here and vanish.
And behind them, once more, is What Is. A bit different in its pattern, a bit darker. But ready to embrace the Imago-Moth-erfly at the end of this cycle, calling it to come home and saying "The story is not over until it's told to someone else. And here are your siblings, waiting for you to come home to tell them what's beyond the sun and what's life and what's suffering and what's love and what's loss." Because it's in all those pretty, petty, sad, terrible, happy moments that life builds itself and finds a meaning that's greater than itself.
What Is awaits us, moths; it gives us a smile and a tear as we return. It listens to us patiently while we complain and remember, argue and cry... And then, bit by bit, we understand that everything matters, but it doesn't. And that life's a deadly game (but hey, it's a game), and after all, how cool is it that we get to be born and get old and learn and forget and hate a bit and hopefully love a bit more, and... can we go back? Once more? Please?
And then the stork pops her head in and says: "Of course, little one, of course; come here. Let's dream a new life..."
Time-lapse Videos
Hey, if you read all that, and in case you’re into that sort of thing, here’s the full sped-up process for the three pieces, warts and all. Might help you unwind, hahaha. Enjoy!
