Category: Artwork

Sketches, rough pencils, finished inks, photoshopped scans.

Pantheon and Christ

I have been thinking about the best or most appropriate way to tackle the relationship between Christ and the gods of Pantheon, and recently I came across a potential approach in Sloterdijk’s “Cabinet of Cynics” chapter from Critique of Cynical Reason where he goes through the five embodiment of cynicism through history. The first suspect is none other than Diogenes, who embodied the low theory version in his decided opposition to the all-too serious discourse of Socrates & Plato. Kynicism was based on the animal nature of man, where the gestures of the body were framed as arguments (farting or shitting or whacking off in public). In other words Diogenes poked fun at his grave opponents, but instead of talking against such idealism, he lived in opposition in an anti-theoretical, anti-dogmatic and anti-scholastic way. Continue reading Pantheon and Christ

Pantheon cover art colored!

Professional comic book colorist David Delanty took the time to color my artwork, and suffice to say, it blew away my expectations.

 

The wonderfully rich, intricate command of colors actually makes up for my amateur stuff in many ways: freckles, shirt stains, water reflection, moss growing on the limestone, serene sky, and more.

You can check out the rest of David’s stuff here at deviantart.com: Link

Pantheon chapter 3, page 1

Sporadically bursting forth, the floating city crowds maliciously, invading Kaeli’s perspective in a series of quasi-discrete snapshots that capture pastiches of reality, a continual flux – each contradicts the next, yet retain an underlying shimmer of dynamic energy… a chaosmos … the horizon of all horizons, the a priori of all a prioris, what Joyce called a cosmos “at the verge of chaos,” on the brink of an explosion towards non-existence, wavering on the razor’s edge of the abyss…

 

Gallery debut show

Last friday night, January 14th, I had ten of my graphic novel pages exhibited at Gallery Godo in Glendale. The reception went above and beyond my expectations. My family was bursting with pride and joy, and many friends and people from the community attended. The other artists were equally talented in different media. The graphic novel pages were appropriately placed in a row in the hall between the rooms. The narrow hall actually forces the viewer to step closer to observe the intricate detailed work. However, that meant my adoring crowd couldn’t really cluster around the artwork and chat! So many showed up that made others think it was a deaf night or something. Pictures after the jump: Continue reading Gallery debut show

Warrior goddess sketch

I tried a new pose because the original wasn’t working. The context is a powerful warrior goddess as envisioned by mortals.

Edited to add:
I was looking at my blog’s stats and saw that someone found it with the search string “warrior goddess.”

So I googled that up to see where my blog ranked and found a blog by Medusa coils complaining about the warrior goddess fetish as if war gods were fitted in a skirt.

So I posted the following comment there:

Sorry for posting this so late, but I believe there’s a general misconception about “warrior goddess” as if there was only one type of a war god to emulate.

In the mythology of Ancient Greece the cleverest immortal was the goddess Metis. Zeus was worried about her outsmarting them all so he married her, only to swallow her whole and absorb her wisdom in the process.

But Metis was already pregnant with Athena at the time, and she was born from his head. Like her parents she was as crafty as Metis and had the warlike nature of Zeus.

However, this mix meant she was the goddess of strategic warfare according to the Greeks, and her favorite mortal was the clever Odysseus.

Ares is the classical war god in its direct and brutal aspect. The Greeks hated Ares and worshipped Athena instead, because she fought with intellect and subtlety.It is not the violence or brutality or the waste of lives/resources, but the rationality and pragmatism that demands us to win wars without bloodshed.

Ares is always depicted as easily misled. The wisdom of Athena turns the violence and aggression of classic male type A against them and use brutality as the cause of their downfall. Athena was always a step ahead by making her moves indirect.

Thus the goddess of war was equal parts philosophy & war, wisdom and battle.