I’m a terrible procrastinator. Actually I’m a very good procrastinator. Do it well. Could have been posting stuff as it was happening, but I seem to have gone into dim mode the whole time. Anyway, we did a pretty lengthy & involved road trip last month. We were heading to a little convention in New Jersey called Pow!Con.
First we stopped at Cadillac Ranch. Don’t know how many times I’ve driven through Amarillo, not that many, but a few, & never stopped there.
This was started last year, as the Plague was kicking in. This is about Ostara, the Goddess of Spring from Germanic folklore. She’s associated with the Equinox of course, that being astronomically the start of Spring (It’s the Vernal Equinox). In Australia, it’s the start of Autumn, because of course they’re all walking around upside-down. There’s a whole thing about a little bird freezing & starving in the winter cold because she (or he) (or they) had been abandoned & forgotten by Ostara, who’d gone out to do a little shopping or something, but she remembered & came back just in time to revive the little bird & make it warm again & make flowers grow & trees blossom & things to be generally nicer, except in Australia. The little bird was so happy & grateful, it went flying around singing songs about how wonderful & beautiful Ostara was, so Ostara turned the bird into a hare (which is not a rabbit; a cottontail is a rabbit, a jackrabbit is a hare), well, it was a power Ostara had, it seemed like a good idea at the time. This hare, having been a bird, could still lay eggs (so it was a girl), so it did that, & hid them around the place & told all the children to go find them because… Ostara. (In some Pagan ceremonies celebrants hold up fresh eggs at some point & break them in their hands; a virgin sacrifice ((got that from Larry Todd)) ) So that is (allegedly) where the “Easter Bunny” came from. This was all being done for hundreds maybe thousands of years before the Christians came in & stuck their holiday of the dying Jew onto this one & tried to make it about resurrection & the Patriarchy & shit.
Anyway, this is Larry trying to figure out how to drive gouache paints, opaque watercolor used by many illustrators. Larry’s painting medium is One Shot sign painting enamels, from many years of painting carnival ride fronts. Mixed results; it’s practice, he’ll get better. But he still won’t make the deadline.
Just a concept doodle for a Cherry Earth Day piece. The idea was that she’s sitting in the Earth, her ass is stuffed into the rich, moist, fertile soil; oh & she should have flowers all around her; oh, & it’s Earth Day, so there’s trees, & grass growing out of the dirt she’s in, & mushrooms of course. Great, now it looks like she’s sitting in a pile of shit. Oh, & animals, shit, has to be some animals, just throw some in, let’s see, stick a gorilla face in the bushes here, gotta have some birds in the trees, well then we need a roadrunner (Roadrunners are badass; they kill & eat rattlesnakes; they really are living dinosaurs). What is that, a squirrel, or just a cat? Oh, & gotta have an elephant, there’s enough space over there to stuff in an elephant’s face. Gotta have an invertebrate, spiders are this guy’s primal fear, but they’re actually our friends, so… aww, the web should be white, crap, this whiteout doesn’t go on very smoothly, probably should do the white digitally, oh, fuck that, it’s a cartoon. Playing around with, practicing digital coloring (can’t really call it painting), so it’s not finished off at all, it’s not a piece, just a study. So I put it off long enough that I missed my chance to do a stunning, inspiring masterpiece for the whole world on Earth Day. Sigh. Oh well.
Doesn’t feel right to say “Happy Earth Day”, should be more like “Do something good on Earth Day & happiness will ensue”. Right?
Yeah, well, I didn’t put anything up yesterday, on Easter, I do my drawing & stuff in a little space 6 miles from the house we’re living in & I usually take Sundays off & stay home, especially that Sunday, being Easter, not that we were celebrating a religious holiday, ’cause it’s not, of course, Easter was celebrated for thousands of years before there was a Christian church & somehow rabbits became associated with Ostara the Goddess of Spring the Bringer of Light, but it’s actually a hare which is different from a rabbit, cottontail bunnies are rabbits, jackrabbits are hares, which are often depicted in some old stories as tricksters, mischief makers, Bugs Bunny is a hare (he should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque). So the story goes that a little bird was left & forgotten by Ostara, almost died in the snow but Ostara finally returned & revived the little bird, who was so happy & grateful that it sang her praises all around, so Ostara for some reason turned it into a hare that could lay eggs, being still part bird, so it did that, laid eggs all around in the fresh grass that had just grown out of the now warm, well-lit ground. Then it split, leaving the children to discover the evidence of her passing through, so it must have been a she, it laid eggs, right? Guess they didn’t get fertilized; none of them ever hatch, do they? So is the Easter (not)Bunny immortal like Santa Claus, or do some of the eggs, the ones that don’t get found, hatch & bring forth a new generation like the New Year? Anyway, if jackrabbits are hares, then out here in the Wild West it must be the Easter Jackalope.
