NOTE: just a quick warning here. Today’s post explains some of my creative process. It also covers all sorts of depressing material - death, famine, plague. So if you want to skip this one, who could blame you?
The stole has been printed and I’m busy stitching it. I’m also busy constructing large cardboard boxes to ship 15 pieces of my art to a big show in Tulsa Oklahoma. But - in my spare time - I keep thinking about the horsemen in the Opus:
The plan was for the horsemen to be a small element in the design. The first impression should be God and the traditional bounty of food, and only on slightly closer inspection would the viewer notice the worried look in Christ’s eyes, the damaged crucifer, the collapse of society. But as I was stitching them, I kept wondering if I should have made the horsemen bigger - like when I had Kramer grow into a huge, hulking evil in the Malleus Maleficarum piece (Below)
I played around with enlarging them (Below):
But the problem is bigger than just size…
You may remember that when I was first designing the piece, I rejected the type of horsemen drawn by Albrecht Druer as too well-fed to play famine. This composite fellow (on the right) got the part (Below):
But I didn’t go far enough. Looking around now, I found this modern image of famine (Below, left). He’s not charging in, but rather defeated-looking, surrounded by insects (locusts? who devoured the crop??) with a very tiny scale to measure out infinitesimal amounts of food. I combined that scale with a near-skeletal figure to get the image on the right……now HE looks like famine.
Now, some of you readers may be asking ‘WHY? Why are you researching alternative images of starvation when the piece is already in progress and you have more than enough on your plate (boxes to build! commission to sew!). …..well, because this is how my brain works. Yes, I’ll get away from the computer - in just a few minutes - and work on the other stuff, but first I just have to find out a little more…….so I Google horsemen, medieval, etc, and slide down the rabbit holes until I hit something that resonates …..
One website https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/faces-death had some great information and images of death:
“Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, The Seventh Seal, a pale-faced figure clad in a billowing, hooded black robe appears on the screen. His macabre appearance is so iconographic that the audience anticipates his answer when the knight Antonius Block asks, “Who are you?” Death, who agrees to grant Block a short reprieve, is intellectual and existentially aware, even witty, and these qualities heighten his unsettling character. Inspiration for Bergman’s portrayal came from one of Albertus Pictor’s fifteenth-century wall paintings in Sweden’s Taby Church, (Below, left) depicting a skeletal Death figure playing chess with a man.”
(Below) “Other cultural traditions represent death as a female figure. The Middle Ages was a period of widespread illness; the Black Death alone killed millions of Europeans. In the church of Saint-André, located in Lavaudieu, France, a fresco dating from 1355 shows death as a tall woman, wearing a scarlet robe and a black veil. She clutches arrows in both hands, and a host of men and women from various social classes fall dead around her, the parts of their bodies commonly afflicted by plague buboes pierced by her arrows. This is not a saintly Madonna offering her restorative healing powers, but a formidable feminine force of wrath and destruction”
(Below) “Alfred Rethel’s woodcut from 1851, Death as a Friend, (left) features a skeletal form resembling a mendicant friar more than a reaper. It is a personalized portrait, retaining elements of the benevolent Angel of Death: the reaper’s scythe leans against the wall and he solemnly performs the duties of the dead bell ringer with a downcast, sorrowful expression.”
and…..
“One cannot help but shudder at Gustav Klimt’s perversely grimacing skull, delighting in any opportunity to take a fatal swipe at the vivid ball of life, in the 1910 canvas Death and Life. “ (right)
(Below) “an 1896 illustration by Theodor Severin Kittelsen depicts the Scandinavian personification of the plague. Pesta is a hideous, stooped old hag whose arrival signals plague and death. Instead of arrows, Pesta carries a rake and a broom; according to the myth, if she used the former, some had a chance of survival, but if she used the latter, not one soul would be spared.”
NOTE: about 70% of bubonic plague victims survived. The Pneumatic version of the plague was 100% lethal. This image really gets to me. Plague as a tired old woman, not some crazy guy on a horse….
(Below) “symbolist painter and writer Alfred Kubin strips death of any disguise in his pen-and-ink drawing, The Best Doctor. Composed between 1901 and 1902, Kubin’s creation is eerily hermaphroditic: the bare skull sprouts tufts of straggly long hair and the body is an amalgamation of masculine muscular arms and a flat chest with sharply exaggerated feminine curves, outlined by a tight black dress. It could almost be described as a figure in drag. The drawing is a dark reflection on humans’ trust in the saving powers of medicine. Death, supposedly “the best doctor,” is not gently covering the eyes of the deceased man, but forcibly pressing down on his face and smothering him”.
