I explored this idea with art long ago when I was a child. If I believed my nostalgic memory of my creations it may be that I did it better then. The story of Noah’s Ark and the flood intrigued me in ways it possibly shouldn’t have at that point in my life. I saw many holes, but many truths. I also saw the art in the story. The writers knew what they were doing. They painted a picture that gave us beauty while leaving just the right amount of dirt to juxtapose in a manner to entrap a person’s imagination. I can’t really go on about all of that because it would be an entire book, but I will go on about the dove and the raven. That is what this painting is about. The story, even painted in glittering gold did not paint these birds as we later view them in the story. The raven and the dove both did their jobs. The raven wasn’t selfish, and the dove was not a glowing beam of pure white in the sky with it’s olive branch. I’m going to talk about the second bird in the story first. The dove. The dumbfounded, awestruck, bedraggled, disheveled, and disarrange in all ways that can be imagined dove.
Look at that dove. When I was working on this my working title was “Seen Some Shit!” As in the dove has seen some shit. When the dove enters the scene in the story my vision of this poor bird is not the one which I have seen so many times put forth by churches and related religious groups. It is not the vision I usually would create if someone wants requests a dove from me. If it is a dove related to Christianity or other Abrahamic faith ideas I make if pretty, glorious, and strong.
Even here I kept it more pristine than I imagine. I kept it more sane. The reality if this story is taken to be true is that this bird would be dumbfounded.
Imagine you are the dove, living your dove life and free of worry while doing dove things. Then poof, you have something happen to your mind, making you feel an urgency to travel, then enter a large man made structure that is full of animals including those which prey on you. Something makes you calm, but your instincts say “That thing will eat me if it gets a chance.” Then imagine the man made structure is closed up, starts moving around, screams of humans are heard outside as rain pounds hard. Then it begins to move hardcore, you are locked in a space with your natural predators, dark, smelly, hot, moving in a way you and I can’t truly imagine because there has been no storm even a tenth that size since. It seems to never stop and when it does you still are moving. Finally you emerge. The other animals have not been allowed freedom. You see the world and it is water. You have been chosen, called, you know your duty. You watch as the raven performs it’s duty. Also called, also the elect of God. The raven is smarter than you are as a dove. Stronger, wiser, and a better survivor. It flies out to do it’s job and you watch. You are in shock, but you are the elected. You have no choice.
The raven is now gone. You are a dove without much reasoning, but a species of the wild. You know not if the raven lives, but it is your turn. You are sent out over the waters. You see bits of land, but your dove instincts aren’t being met. Eventually they are, and you succeed, as was ordained by the Word.
So, doves and pigeons can’t eat carrion. They also instinctively need to build themselves a nest and instinctively know the way home. Genesis says that Noah sent out a “dove,” but in all really, it was not likely to be the European Turtle-Dove, but instead the Rock Pigeon, whose biblical Hebrew name yonah, used in the text is translated as either pigeon or dove. I went with a disheveled dove instead of a rock pigeon because if I used a rock pigeon the iconography would be a fail for sure. Nobody would get it, and instead of this painting representing an image of a dumbstruck dove on a mission from God, we would have a pigeon wanting some crackers on a ledge. Anyways, this dove/pigeon was the perfect choice for this job. It would by nature have went searching for twigs and branches to build itself a nest. Until twigs and branches were found there was no way to be getting off that ark and letting loose the animals because the circle of life demands vegetation to exist.
So what was the raven doing? A lot of ignorant ass people and preachers have painted the raven’s flight as a fail. Seems weird for a preacher to do so, but whatever… Like the dove, a raven has instincts. It lives in a certain manner and does specific things. It is (unlike a dove) extremely intelligent too. The writers of the text included in the bible were very aware of the ravens nature. They did not state a specific purpose to the raven’s flight in the text I’d guess because they assumed all would understand it. People were more sparse and animals more plentiful in those days. We humans were closer to and understood the natural world much better then.
The raven is a carrion eater. It can eat the dead stuff, but unlike what even many preachers and rabis assumed… eating death on the sea… they can’t do that. Why? Swimmers they aren’t.
Land had been sighted before the raven was sent out. The tops of the mountains it says. Sending a raven first was to make sure the waters had receded enough for the raven. It needs shelter and food. If it has shelter and food then humans can hope. The raven flew around a good long time finding not what it needed, but when it did, it was gone. This signaled the time of dove. The dove could not have told Noah there was land to give hope. The dove instinctually would have just kept returning.
If you are not a bible reader some notes on timing here. The flood did not last just 40 days. That is what most people will say. 40 days and 40 nights is how long the rain poured in a crazy manner to initially flood everything. It then continued to rain for 110 days more. After that they floated the flooded earth for another seventy-four days before a mountain top was found. Another month and a half almost till the raven was brought forth to do it’s job. Noah didn’t leave the boat until couple months after the dove had taken off on it’s third flight. If you want to be a stickler and read the chronology and add it all up we end up with the whole event being 371 days, and some animals being in the ark for up to 378 days. How could they look so darn pretty like the goofy illustrations always show in the little kid books?
Now, if you are or are not religious this painting and my babble about the state of the dove should still be cool. The story of the flood is old. The great deluge happened and all peoples with ancient stories of the past have a version of it. The oldest form of genesis with this story in it comes from 1000 BCE. The poems of Gilgamesh Epic poems tell the story similarly including our raven and dove, but with an additional swallow added in. The oldest written record of the story is from 2150 BC. Think on that. Until recently that is about as old as it got. The oldest human manuscripts ever found were estimated to be from possibly 2600 BC. Nobody thought humans could even make such things before 2200 BC. until recently.
Science. Oh the prickly pear that science has become in this F’d up century. It isn’t just science attached to medicine and biology that has turned into some sort of pay for consensus crud instead of a quest for knowledge. Nor is it just “climate” scientists who are pushing dogma back and forth for dollars. Sadly it has spilled into paleontology and general biology as well. Everything really. It is sad. Nonetheless, even with the “scientists” and historians who specialize in the fields that would be touching on this, a general consensus is there. Two actually. One is that we had a huge worldwide flood. Dates don’t match up to those in Exodus though. Two, we had a catastrophic almost worldwide flood that caused a flooding where most of the people existed. This would according to science be the flood talked about in all the ancient texts because it would make more sense when looking at timelines.
Personally, I think they need to stop acting like they know things they are guessing at. We (humans) don’t know crud. We discover new things constantly and find things we believed yesterday are total hogwash today. All of the sciences are in their infancy. Someday if humans don’t kill themselves off as a species I think people will back at us the way we now look back on people of the bronze age. They will wonder at our ignorant belief’s and find interest in us primarily through varied lenses of wondering how we somehow became them.
So… The painting. You can get a print of it HERE – The Dumbfounded Elect Art Prints. It is available as nice art prints, lower cost posters, and even as an expensive puzzle you can give to someone as a gift. Make sure to tell them what the working title was. That would still be the title, but some places I sell prints wont allow the word shit. Gotta keep the title consistent.
I must remember to never do reverse image searches on my work. Every time I do I end up pissed and start putting Huge watermarks on my pictures of paintings, drawings, and tattoos. Thieves! So many thieves, and they are often not in countries where you can do anything about it. Then if they are you usually find them to be some jackass without a pot to piss in and nothing to lose so they don’t give a crud. They aren’t making money off it so recourse is zero. At best you can spend a bunch of cash and time to deal with them. The clipart sites are the worst. Thieves! The second worse are the “Tattoo design” sites. They sell or offer free tattoo designs, often to shops. Now there are packs with tattoo “templates” for newer tattooers to use with their digital drawing tools as well that just rip off peoples stuff. At least give the artists credit you fucks. I’d guess there are a good thousand plus of my original tattoo designs out there being used right now with zero artist credits or credited to themselves. That doesn’t even count the hundreds of thousands of “original” designs by new artists who think original means snagging my shit (or someone else) and changing a frigg’n leaf or moving an eyelash and saying “I drew that.” I have even seen my drawings on people as tattoos by people who claimed it as theirs. So annoying. Don’t mistake my annoyance with art thieves as annoyance with people using other peoples art for tattoos. I straight up sold thousands of sets of tattoo flash (designs) to individuals and shops over the years. They were meant for other tattooers to tattoo them on people. I also taught classes at conventions, did seminars, etc. Materials included art. I tattoo all sorts of stuff I didn’t create. I use other peoples art for inspiration pretty often. You can see me talking about this in my post After Munch’s Kiss by the Window for example. Inspiration! I then titled it as is proper. Also we can’t always credit an artist or we don’t need to credit it because of it’s association with other things. Example = A Green Day Bunny tattoo. I do not claim to have created the art. Thieves!
So, that rant came from me seeing some thieving of my stuff I didn’t like in a way I didn’t like, then making the mistake of reverse image searching it to find more foul play I didn’t approve of. While doing this I was supposed to be searching for some pictures of a girls arm and measurments to draw her up some stuff. I saw a pic of some one shot freshie peonies I did around the time I took the other pictures and decided to post a pic. WATERMARKS! ha ha ha… rip this off dip sticks.
Now is where it all gets funny. I start sticking Aarron.com all over this tattoo I did of some peonies. They are drawn in a style I draw as is obvious if you follow my art blog. I do almost always reference flowers though. Even ones such as these which I have drawn various renditions of over and over and over. I cannot for the life of me recall if these are 100% freehanded Bic pen on the arm, or if I made a stencil, or if I drew them up from scratch if I did use a stencil, or what I referenced, or if I referenced … how much???? If I didn’t draw it or cheesed it hard, does that make me guilty of theft as well? No, I don’t think so as we are now looking at a specific illustration style, a common subject matter, and a non statement with no character changes beyond it’s being brought from nature to an illustration. With all that said, I’d assume I just looked up peonies on my phone and from a mix of whatever photos popped up of actual peonies either quick sketched it on paper to the required dimensions and then maybe cleaned it up, or… I googled and did the same thing, but directly on skin with a pen before tattooing.
Pictures of tattoos aren’t sold. They have no monetary worth. Why would they be stolen you may ask yourself. It is because ass-wipes use them to promote themselves by trying to pass off other peoples work as their own. Yes, that is a thing. It is a huge thing. I have even found my own work and work of other people I know in physical portfolios of tattooists and on walls in shops. They usually pic things they would like to do stylistically. They pick pieces that are beyond them, but they aspire to. They rarely pick fancy signature style pieces, but they do that as well. You won’t see many ripping off pics of larger or more unique themes. It is often the most common of themes. Peonies and the like. Usually they are one shot pieces like this one I have posted above. Things that take between an hour up to maybe four-ish hours are normal. People flipping through books don’t pay that close of attention usually, they are just getting a basic judgment. Tattoos of the one shot type are almost always believable as anybody’s. It isn’t questioned. These people who thieve like that are scum. None of them can pull off what they rip off. They are trying to fool clients into thinking they are better than they are. I have in person said “This is mine” on more than one occasion. The response is always some variation of “I didn’t put my name on it, I’m just using it as an example.” If you have a book of tattoo photos and you tattoo, people will assume they are yours. Everyone knows this. It is a total bullshit excuse. The internet has helped slow it down in a way because many just have online portfolios. Easier for people to call bull-pucky. It also has made it worse though as it is easy to snag the images and the people who are thieving aren’t usually the people with eyes on them in general. Grr… Alrighty, ending my long winded rant about art theft and Douch-bag tattooers.
The tattoo above = Quick one shot freshie peonies. Bicep, and poor girl had to suffer some leaves on the inside bend of her arm. Lovely spot that… sensitive and gets agitated quickly. Didn’t have to listen to me rant. She was just playing her tunes. End of story.
Ran into this tattoo picture in a mixed file and have zero clue when I did it, but I do actually remember who it was on. The oddity in that is I remember the person, but not the actual application or when. Suppose it doesn’t matter, but it made me decide to post it.
Besides that, I gotta say I like the tattoo. It is pretty sweet and was a fun surprise to run into.
Random tattoo phone picture because I just had the thought “I have not posted a tattoo in a bit, and I told myself I would. I just dumped last months photos from my phone to the pc, and I scrolled… this was the first tattoo I noticed. Winner winner chicken…. yeah yeah, random is the key.
What I recall with my space cadet artist fried brain here is the person who got this sent me a few skeletons with flowers and wanted the basic idea, but with certain features, plus the butterfly on a finger and I asked if I could do random wildflowers. I basically ripped off the lower section, copied the spine style, re-drew the ribs because I didn’t like the ones I saw because they seemed to dark for a floral piece. I looked up wildflowers, got bored looking for something fresh, and mostly went with my own. I do lots of tiny flower stuff, so no problem.
The client got this on the back of her calf, it was a quick one sitting thing, she sat fine (actually laid on a table because doing the back of a calf isn’t always comfy in a chair) no crazy stories to go with it. I took a pic, went on about life, saw the pic just now and remembered all that.
Life is all about the masks we wear sometimes. How we present ourselves to society. The various ways we present to different people. What we hide. Some, some wives… wear the mask of a Vixen at times.
If you would like to get a print of this artwork on canvas, you can do so HERE.
Emojis have become a big part of our culture and it makes sense that they must slowly creep into the world of art beyond just hanging about in pop culture and chats.
So…
Here I have played with the emojis of eggplants and a peach. I stylized it after Edvard Munch’s most know work in pop culture which is The Scream. I made sure that the peach is eye catching by making it the light of the image, but I moved the light source so that in radiated onto the whole scene, and that made my light the focus of light as well. No light emanates from the light, but instead onto it. Two Eggplants, one on each side, the peach the focus of attention in the scene, one eggplant is closest to the viewer (you) so that there is no doubt of what you see. Subtle play with colors makes it appear more eggplants are waiting in the scene, but out of view.
Why make this? I had already wanted to make something eggplant emoji related, but had no good reason. I have been working on a lot of graphic illustrations for T-Shirts for a website of late, and I thought I could make it as a T-shirt design, but in a very graphic cartoony style. I did so, but it was kinda a flop of a design. It looked more like a gay male targeted image, and that wasn’t the demographic I was shooting for. I figured I should reverse engineer my idea. So… I created this from that. Then I created a graphic cartoonish version from this for the shirts. From cartoons, to this, to a nice T-shirt graphic of a naughty nature featuring the eggplants and peach for the innuendos.
Artistic Flow is my (Aarron Laidig's) personal art blog. This is not my catalog or one of my studio pages.
If you are seeking my art catalog it is located here.
I no longer maintain a section or site devoted to my photography, but if you know my work and wish to inquire please feel free to contact me via my contact form.
