Pre-Birth of sorts

PreIncarnation once again took a very long time to create. Not merely because it coincided with 2023 when my daughter was born, thus giving me little time to work and focus, but also because it’s big, as big as “The Bear” and with a lot more black ink to fill in.

I still haven’t found a consistent black marker to match my Muji pens in terms of color and attributes, so the original still has some visible differences in the tone of black ink used.

PreIncarnation was inspired by a thought I had late in 2023; it’s the idea of how intense the experience of a soul must be before it gets incarnated into our physical world. The idea of going from a space of infinite knowledge, love and wisdom, to a small creature in a womb, not knowing anything. This soul becomes deprived of all its previous memories and understandings, all in the name of reliving more experiences starting from 0. It’s quite a humbling and scary thought. The illustration captures my now familiar “Sprite” about to go into the funnel that would end up on the other side… a physical body. It’s a difficult journey for all souls I suspect. Seeing my daughter in the moment of her birth, it’s quite shocking to see the exhaustion and pain every soul endures the moment of birth.

How daunting it must be, to be in the ether, knowing you have to jump in again and erase nearly all of the knowledge you experienced in the great beyond, whatever that may be. How reductionist is the human experience to what’s beyond the void, why would any soul choose to jump in again? It’s a question I haven’t been able to answer yet. One thought is that the soup of the universe is made up of these experiences… the physical experience is fundamental to the beauty of the infinite, it builds into it. Still, would any soul actually CHOOSE to make such a leap? Over and over?

The Bear

I’ve been working on this piece for nearly a year. It is easily my biggest and most ambition drawing to date. Like all of my works, it’s deeply personal and has many hidden aspects that bubbled to the surface throughout the various months of its inception.

I started The Bear without knowing for months what the subject matter would be. Like many other pieces, it started with some abstract lines in an evening of pain… caused by a random yet now familiar emotional wave in the spring of 2021. I never intended for The Bear to end up having so many aquatic themes, from the animals in the entire bottom and right side the artwork, to the giant wave, to the fact that I’m playing water polo with The Bear.

The Bear himself came to me as an old friend in several dreams. What’s most striking however, is that he showed up as my spirit animal; I was exhibiting “bear like” behavior months before I came to realize his importance in my life. From my love of berries, to climbing the trees around my house, to naming various electric smart home devices after bears, I realized the bear was already expressing himself through me. I read the section of the bear in “Animal Speak” by Ted Andrews, it was here where it became obvious how many threads of my life were defined by bear-like tendencies. If you feel an animal has started appearing in your life, I highly recommend sections of that book to better understand what certain animals mean in our lives.

The energy and spirt of The Bear has helped to keep me safe on at least one spiritual journey within 2021. Since then, my wife Adela agreed it’s a good idea to give me little totems that allow me to honor the bear’s importance. He’s on my nightstand, as a ceramic on a wall in our house, and soon to be as my interpretation.

I’m extremely proud of Him. He’s me and I am him, yet we are very much separate beings. I honor his strength, playfulness, appetite and ability to climb trees, among other things.

Thanks buddy, I couldn’t have made it out of that cold forest without you.

A Lamp.

When I first started this little hobby back in late 2018, I had a vision to create something that was effectively difficult to look at. A contrast so stark and sharp that an image would not do it justice. I always imagined I would need some extremely black paint and a very bright LED medium as the backdrop.

I originally envisioned using Vantablack as the paint of choice, but that hope was quickly dashed when I realized 2 things about Vantablack:

1. that you can’t buy it

2. that it basically works best when it’s baked on metal at extremely high temperatures

This realization dashed my dreams of finding my medium for a long time. It was only in November that I was watching a Youtube video of a guy that discovered a new 99.6% light absorption paint called Musou Black. Musou black can only be purchased from the supplier directly from Japan as of this writing and it’s nowhere near as light absorbing as Vantablack’s nanotube technology, which absorbs over 99.9% of light (That last .3% makes a huge difference). But nonetheless, this is some pretty dark paint, and it doesn’t need to be baked on metal.

After I received the paint, I realized I still didn’t solve my LED backlight problem, but I quickly realized I had a nice looking LED lamp that I bought for my house a few months prior. I decided to use it as a test bed for my work and I have to say I’m pretty proud of how it turned out.

I needed to tape the sides I didn’t want painted and sand the light surface otherwise the already brittle paint would flake off very easily. Next I created a drawing on an old plastic sticker of my “Sprite” logo and cut out the outline. I then carefully placed the sticker, removed the inside of the Sprite and painted over the rest.

2 coats of paint later and voila! I was able to peel away all the tape and stickers and reveal the finished work. I think what I like most about this lamp is that it proved my concept and idea. It looks exactly like I imagined it would (anyone creating anything knows it’s good when what you create turns out as you expect), and critically, an image doesn’t do it justice.

The contrast is so stark, especially on the lamp’s brightest setting that it’s almost difficult to observe. It achieves an essence of contrast that I envisioned and it sets me up nicely with my next project. I haven’t yet resolved the color issue, but that’s a topic for the next piece.

Until next time.

This Took a While...

I started “Daybreak” back in May 2019, and nearly as soon as I started it, I lost motivation to work on it, for several months. During the summer months there were times where this drawing would see 5 minutes of effort per week. Sometimes it would not get any attention for a whole month. It slowly dawned on me that my inspiration disappears during the summer months; since it was only in late September that I slowly started making progress on it again.

Part of the issue with this piece is that it’s a self portrait, so I suspect I had a lot of subconscious apprehension about how it would turn out. It’s called “Daybreak” because my middle name, Zoran, means “daybreak” in Serbian. Writing it out now makes it feel a bit cheesy but I don’t care, I’m fairly happy with how it turned out and it’s a decent abstract representation of the side of my face when I had long hair.

One thing I enjoyed and want to continue doing is incorporating natural elements in my drawings. This one has several, albeit shortened maps of actual real world rivers — top left is a loose interpretation of the Missouri river. My flora still need a lot of work in terms of detail and variety however.

First Small Dive Into The Art World

I have a good friend that was super supportive of my work from the moment he saw it. After I made “Twist” I asked him what his favorite color was and he said blue. And thus came “The Blue Lake”.

What makes me so grateful for him liking and wanting to buy this piece is that it got my ass into gear and forced me to start editing all my works. Suddenly I was made to think about mediums and where I would be able to have such a print and frame done.

He’s bound to move to San Francisco very soon, all this learning had to be expedited, but in the end I think it turned out pretty well. Hopefully they all look this decent blown up!

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