Creative Cogitation

One of my favorite fables is the one of the Scor­pion and the Frog. It basi­cally says some will be true to their nature no mat­ter how they are treated or what the con­se­quences are.   Vari­a­tions of the story swap a youth, man, kan­ga­roo or tur­tle in place of the frog, and/or a snake in the place of the scor­pion.  The tale? A scor­pion and a frog are at the shores of a river, when the scor­pion asks the frog to ferry him across the water. The frog is afraid the scor­pion will sting him, but the scor­pion assures him that he will not and they begin the jour­ney across river. In the mid­dle of the river the scor­pion stings the frog, and as the frog founders in the water he asks the scor­pion, “Why? Now we will both drown.” and the scor­pion sim­ply replies, “I am a scorpion.”

So the story came up in con­ver­sa­tion sev­eral times in one day and being true to my nature as an artist I got a cou­ple of ideas.  Aimee Davi­son, @onehundredjobs on twit­ter, asked, “Why don’t you paint it?” and so I did.

The first ver­sion, The Scor­pion & The Frog, is rather literal.

The Scor­pion & The Frog 14 x 11 inch acrylic paint­ing on water­color paper by Phoenix, AZ artist, Jake Beckman

There is a golden spi­ral in the back­ground, which coin­cides with the tip of the scorpion’s curl stinger.

One of my online art bud­dies, Dave Con­rey, told me on Face­book that he has a tat­too of a scor­pion on his back ref­er­enc­ing this fable.  As for me I think doing a paint­ing or two is enough.

The sec­ond ver­sion, Scor­pi­ons & Frogs, is a lit­tle more abstract.

Scor­pi­ons & Frogs, 14 x 11 inch acrylic on water­color paper, by Phoenix AZ Artist Jake Beckman

The pat­tern is a Pen­rose Sun, it is a tiling based on 2 tiles, in this case a scor­pion tile & a frog tile.  I have left two tiles blank.  One is pre­sum­ably from the escaped scor­pion in the image and it is up to the viewer to won­der where the frog got off to.

Both works are for sale.  Make me an offer.  I hope you like them. 

Yours in Art

Jake, Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The artist has fed­er­ally copy­righted all the art­work in this blog. The artist retains all repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights. You may not copy, re-distribute, imi­tate, derive OR oth­er­wise use these images in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

While I Paint Just a Kiss

Occa­sion­ally I do a series of paint­ing in process pho­tos. To me it is enjoy­able to see how some­thing goes from an idea in my mind’s eye to con­vert­ing plain white can­vas into lay­ers of paint wrought with mean­ing. (more…)