Beautiful Monster I - III: Reaching Toward a Missing Piece

These three pieces, currently on display locally at The Overlook, arrived together in my head, conceptually. I had an idea of alien waters and sleek, dangerous monsters reaching toward a lone figure in a boat. I don't draw easily, but I had a thought about how to create the figure in a boat, using some abstract techniques. It seemed like something within reach of my current skills and fit with my original show idea.

Honestly, I think it was reachable, if I had given myself more time to work on it. But time was a resource I didn't budget properly. Or, rather, time was a resource that external factors hoovered away from my art in a manner I was not prepared to counteract. Either way, the original idea was required to shift in deference to the realities of my time budget. I still had fun with this. Creating the three shades of alien waters was a lot of fun. I always enjoy playing with inks on canvas, tilting the flow here and there, combining shades, spraying with alcohol as everything tried to create neat patterns, layering with more.

The Beautiful Monsters themselves were a blast to make. I used my very technical "paint smoosh" technique to create the color variety, the sense of depth and movement with texture. Because I had abandoned my lone figure in a boat being menaced by a creature from below, I made the tentacles and monstrous bodies more pleasantly plump than eerily sleek.

By this time, the show concept was starting to come back together after an initial disintegration. I knew that I wanted to focus on neurographic line art and have that be thematic to the show, and these pieces didn't have any nuerographic line art as yet. So I decided to add in some seaweed. Only this seaweed would be made in part from neurographic lines and also end up looking suspiciously like DNA. Perfect.

While they are not required to be displayed together, these three pieces do function as something of a triptych. They harmonize quite nicely, and I played with their naming (i.e. which one would be Beautiful Monster I vs Beautiful Monster III, etc) by laying them out on the floor in different orders. The blue water creature was always meant to be in the middle (and, therefore, Beautiful Monster II), but did I want the pink and green water creatures aiming toward center or spreading out from it? I liked a swimming toward convergence feel, and that is how each was numbered.

These pieces are meant to be paired with their respective number and color of Aurora Alienus, another triptych with a story of skill level vs time to share, and I think all six pieces could fit very nicely into an aquarium cafeteria or kids play room or something else where bright bold colors and strange but silly creatures watching over things would make a funky kind of sense.

I still think about the original idea of sleek, menacing monsters reaching out toward a solitary person in a small rowboat. I imagine I'll try again at it at some point in the future when I either have more time for that skill stretch or just want to play on my own time.