Visions, Lightly Fevered

Robopillar

An unexpected sister piece to Butterfly Bot from I, Robot. An enthusiast e-mailed me that he had tattooed the Butterfly Bot insectoid on his arm, and would I consider doing a robot caterpillar, so that he might ink the other arm? I thought it was a grand idea, and a couple years later, I got around to it. Unfortunately, my enthusiast was by then past the tattooing phase of life, and contented himself with a print.

Jumpsuit

Done in Prismacolor pencil on black board, in the aftermath of my seeing David Lynch's movie adaptation of Dune for the first time. The ornate pseudo-Baroque/Imperial design rife with austere blacks, coupled with the stark story pacing, were like nothing I'd seen in science fiction. This was years before I would be tapped to do the Dune card game.

Flight from the Claymore

I was reading Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three when it occurred to me how gorgeous would be a Brandywine-style "Illustrated Classics" version of the novel. In this scene from near the beginning of the novel, the Marquis (an opponent of the French revolution) is smuggled ashore, just evading a deadly and doomed sea battle.

Martian Flyer

A completely improvised piece, with no sketches or preliminaries. Just a rough gouache painting, then overpainted in oil. An air-breathing jet aircraft, energized by nuclear fusion.

Helium

The first of the Noble Gases, Helium is named from the Greek root helios, meaning sun. As a gas it is buoyant in air, entirely benign in the body, and does not freeze at any temperature we can devise. Her emission spectrum is a rosy vermillion. Helium is useful for scientific experiments into superconductivity -- the absence of electrical friction -- and as a liquid it is a superfluid which will climb the walls of its container to escape. She is effortlessly powerful, radiant, benevolent, and not a little "above it all." The opposite number to Radon.

Argon

The third of the Noble Gases, Argon makes up a percent of the air we breathe and is accordingly commonplace. Its spectral emission is blue, and its root word is the Greek argos, meaning stable. It is used wherever a non-reactive gas is needed -- as, for instance, where ordinary air might cause oxidation or ignition. It is non-toxic, but owing to its weight it is used to smother chickens. As a character, Argon is hard-working, dependable, bull-headed, remorseless and possessed of steady nerves. She represents earthy virtues and is the opposite number to the exotic Xenon.

Xenon

The fifth of the Noble Gases, from the Greek xenos, meaning stranger. She is everything alien, and her spectrum is violet. Xenon gas is relatively rare on Earth, used in excimer lasers, in ion spacecraft engines, and also as an anaesthetic -- an expensive, non-toxic asphyxiant which must be employed with extreme care. Exemplifying the exotic, she is Argon's opposite number.

Radon, and Her Decay Daughters

Radon comes from under the Earth, and is the sixth and heaviest of the Noble Gases. Also the only one that is unstable -- breaking down radioactively into Lead, Bismuth and Polonium, known to chemists as her "decay daughters." Her color is that of phosphorescence, the way her radioactive decay is made visible to the eye. She is accordingly poisonous, though useful once precautions are taken. Her daughters are of mixed virtue: Lead is useful and hard-working, though a moderately toxic heavy metal. Bismuth is entirely salutary and may be ingested without fear. Polonium is deadly and has no redeeming qualities. In every way, Radon is the opposite of Helium.

Sands of Gorgoroth

The first in what I hope will be a series of paintings based on the theme of Kirill Yeskov's The Last Ringbearer. Yeskov is a paleontologist and an obsessed fan of The Lord of the Rings, and in the tradition of the parallel novel, his work shares Tolkien's created world. But much as as in Gregory Maguire's Wicked -- a parallel novel about the events of Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz -- in this universe the original becomes a distorted view, the sagas of the heroic men of Westernesse and the craven evil of Mordor really fables told for propaganda by the victors, and where we see the morally turbid, secret dealings behind the War of the Ring laid bare.

The first Lord of the Rings drawing I did as a teenager was of orcs, and they've always fascinated me. In The Last Ringbearer, orcs are not monsters but human beings of a non-Westernesse race who call themselves Orocuen, plying their livings as nomadic herders upon the arid expanses of the Mordor plain. This troupe is heading North, fleeing the invasion of Mordor at Cirith Ungol and seeking a pass over the Morgai range, finding that the destruction has preceeded them. Oroduin smolders in the background, and the enormous pillar of smoke beyond marks what used to be Barad-Dur.

Sands of Gorgoroth detail #1

Sands of Gorgoroth detail #2

There is only one man-at-arms in our troupe, perhaps a lone survivor of some lost regiment of Mordor. Is he a protector or the protected?

Sands of Gorgoroth detail #3

In Tolkien's telling, as in most every adaptation of Middle Earth, orcs had no women, children, or families.

Prairie Dragon

A commissioned piece, which gave me the opportunity to tip my hat to the genius of Theo Janssen, builder of the amazing "Strandbeest." What if a prairie-dwelling culture built a wind-powered walking machine big enough to hold several families and their belongings, in a land where the wind never stopped? What if dragons of fur, feathers and wool helped travelers carry their burdens? What if the two dragons, mechanical and animal, happened upon each other?

Prairie Dragon detail #1

Theo Janssen builds his "creatures" out of PVC pipe, zip ties, plastic soda bottles, bicycle pumps, tubing, and thin plastic sheeting. And powered by the wind, they walk -- even storing up wind energy as compressed air inside the bottles. He has invented a new type of articulated leg that is nearly as friction-free as a wheel. Though the overall design of the machine shown above is my own, I have scrupulously recreated Janssen's unique leg design.

This prairie clan has built their walker from similarly lightweight wood, reeds, stretched hides, cloth, fired clay, and a few parts of metal. The zeppelin-like top half gathers wind energy via its flapping, fin-like vanes, and pivots freely to track the wind. It transmits its power down to the legs via a vertical shaft in the exact center of the pivot.

Prairie Dragon detail #2

Which continent are we on here? This piece gave me a chance to mash-up two classic prairie-dwelling cultures: Native American and Mongolian.