Awakening Upon Death of the Bride of the Creature: details and analysis

I’m pretty happy with this piece. It blends several of my approaches, resulting in a non-cliched Sci-Fi, mixed with an Impressionist treatment, Baconian distortions, and faux painterly flairs including Van Gogh brush strokes. So, I’m mixing my Fine Art with the Sci-Fi (now “retro”) of my childhood, which represented a window of escape from quotidian existence, into the realms of the imagination, and of exploring the reaches of technology and the future. But it also has an existentialist and spiritual aspect to it (Without explaining why, you can just see it for yourself in details like the stillness of the reflected water in the mouth).

It’s a contemporary tableaux image, done with classic painterliness, composition, and color palette. The content is something that I hadn’t set out to do, but evolved through the process. This started as an image of an alien. But what it is, I think, is interesting. Anything to do with the Creature From the Black Lagoon is automatically interesting to me. And you could say this is my attempt to make a contemporary CFBL.

This one appears to be the bride of the creature, which is another thing that just came about. If she’s anything like the Bride of Frankenstein, than she was artificially created. Here she’s been shot. That’s how the creature met his end in the Revenge of the Creature of the Black Lagoon (there was no “Bride of the Creature” or “Gil Woman”.).

She seems to be at least half submerged in water, and is looking up at us, perhaps reaching out to grab us. Or she could be falling back and reaching to hold something. Her eyes look shocked. She’s looking into another dimension. She’s died and reawakened. She’s crossing the threshold of death and moving into the void.

That puts us in the void looking at her coming in to us. Uuuuuh, that would mean that you wouldn’t be seeing this unless you’d already crossed over yourself. You’d be dead. At least according to the scenario.

So, in addition to some cool Sci-Fi reference, which I didn’t just copy but interpreted in my own way, there’s also this concept of awakening upon death into another reality that is shocking and overpowering, like peering into the absolute truth, or knowing everything at once. It’s also like having one’s spirit peeled like a grape and exposed to the unalloyed power of the void, so to speak.

But it’s visual art so the rendition is going to be the main thing. I worked hard on details like the tendril from the chin that wraps over the shoulder. The hand coming out of water, with fin-like frills coming off of it, was particularly hard to draw. And at one point the lobster was in the hand.

I think this can be enjoyed on a purely painterly level. Yes, it’s digital, but that just means that I “paint” with a pen and tablet. I make every brush stroke individually. I’ve developed techniques over years to make those strokes look like real paint.

In the end, for me, the image is paramount. I don’t care how someone makes it. So I make them look like paintings because that’s the look that I love, but I do it digitally because the process is much more flexible, and allows for a lot more experimentation and mistakes. Since I particularly like to experiment, and make mistakes, it suits my personality.

Even though I’ve made paintings in the past, I don’t think I could have painted this as well.

To me, this is the type of cool art that I like, so it’s what I make. It has an interesting or sensational topic, it’s got the quality of realism about it while addressing something unreal, it has feeling, and it uses aesthetics to a high degree. For me, it’s beautiful. Details like the water being reflective, or the ripples around the arm would be enough to please me if someone else had made it.

I also made this quite large, so it should print out beautifully at 5 feet wide. It could be shown in a gallery. But galleries usually sell one of a kind artifacts for art buyers to invest in. I can only sell copies.

My idea about making and selling art is simple, logical, and optimistic. However, it doesn’t work. My idea is to make the kind of work that I want to see myself, and sell it cheaply via prints (such as posters), which should look awesome because it’s not a photo of a painting, it’s done directly in pixels. So, the end user gets a beautiful product dirt cheap. I could try some tricks like making limited edition prints, but that seems bizarre when it’s a digital file and one can print it on metal if one wants, and technology for printing will probably improve. So why limit oneself to making a small set of prints just to create scarcity? Why sell to one art buyer who might hide the piece away in storage?

If I could make a $10 profit on 100 prints, that’s a thousand dollars. I can live cheaply, so one might think it would be possible to sustain myself selling prints. But I haven’t sold any to anyone I didn’t already know. I’ve made $0.00 off of my art.

I need to switch up my strategy for getting my work out there and selling it. I prefer to think about how to make art, because that should be the hard and important part.

Anyway, below are details of this piece showing the painterly feel.