Creative Cogitation

OK tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties had me down for a while. My 2-year old lap­top started shut­ting down ran­domly.  It would appear to be an over heat­ing issue with the moth­er­board.  Any­way, I had to pur­chase a new lap­top and migrate over to it, right at the end of tax sea­son (my day job) and just before some friends blew into to town.  Need­less to say, I barely got the new machine up and run­ning before I dis­ap­peared to the toolies with my guests (no cell ser­vice or inter­net).   My apologies. Still work­ing the bugs out even now, but I think I am back up to speed for the most part now. 

So I get back online and find over 100 spam com­ments, many with links to sites that really have noth­ing to do with a given subject. A lot of the spam just says some­thing generic like, “thx for the post,” but at least one was insult­ing (as if that is going to get them past my mod­er­a­tion).  Many are absolute gib­ber­ish, with ran­dom let­ters for their user id, and ran­dom words with tons of links.  After weed­ing through them I was left with a few com­ments that might be some­thing but, which are too vague to deter­mine for sure. 

After going through all that I went to see what I had hang­ing around in my drafts folder and found this one.  This next paint­ing debuted at the Sun­nys­lope art­walk where it was well received.  Again the color gamut of the pho­to­graph really does not do jus­tice to the real thing, but you should be able to get at least a sense of what it might look like.  Of course see­ing it in per­son it always better. 

When I did Born of Fire,  I was very happy with the result, but I was aim­ing for some­thing a lit­tle more fluid and abstract and less con­crete than that paint­ing turned out. I revis­ited the con­cept this time try­ing to keep it looser.  I still have not reached for what I am aim­ing for, so there will prob­a­bly be a few more incar­na­tions before the vision in my mind’s eye is met.

Infer­nal Instinct. A dragon dances in vol­canic fire.

For me fire drag­ons and fire­birds kind of merge.  My drag­ons do tend to have bird-like ele­ments.  So if you ask me if this is a Phoenix or a Dragon, the answer is, yes. 

In the west­ern lex­i­con a dragon is an evil, war­like thing per­haps drawn from the ser­pent in the gar­den of Eden, where as the Phoenix, because of its immor­tal­ity & rebirth has been asso­ci­ated with the res­ur­rec­tion of Christ. 

Of course drag­ons sym­bol­ize gen­er­ally pos­i­tive attrib­utes in Asian cul­tures; drag­ons have power over water, floods and rain and can sym­bol­ize hid­den wisdom. 

One of my thoughts: The ser­pent in the gar­den of Eden gave mankind the gift of knowl­edge — so was the ser­pent really evil? Is our myth­i­cal ser­pent all that dif­fer­ent from the ori­en­tal ones? To me drag­ons seem more like Prometheus, giv­ing the gift of fire to man. 

The world over drag­ons do seem to sym­bol­ize a pro­tec­tive power-even in west­ern mythol­ogy they were guardians of great treasure.

So my take on drag­ons is that they are divine crea­tures with gen­er­ally pos­i­tive attributes.  I espe­cially like the idea that they can fly.

As for fire­birds, Phoenix were gen­er­ally con­sid­ered benev­o­lent, although some­times haz­ardous to mankind. Many leg­ends speak to the note only the glory of its plumage but also the beauty of its song.  In Chi­nese mythol­ogy, some­times the Phoenix is con­sider the fem­i­nine coun­ter­part to the mas­cu­line dragon, therefore my thought that they are dif­fer­ent faces to the same thing is not nec­es­sar­ily unheard of.  

Finally I note that in evo­lu­tion­ary terms, birds arose from rep­tiles at some point in the remote past, a final con­nec­tion between dragon and bird. 

For more details about Infer­nal Instinct see  its art page at AKAJake.com.

Any com­ments? Do you think drag­ons and phoenix have sim­i­lar qualities?  Do you think of them as good, evil, or neu­tral? I am curi­ous as to what oth­ers think about this subject. 

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

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