Black Gold

The thought for this painting began a few months ago when the BP oil disaster was in full swing. Assigning various gods for recurring purposes that affect the quality of our lives is a lost tradition. Here is another one of my submissions to The Hall Of Gods, pending to be patented and endowed with a slot for receiving limitless financial gifts. Maybe that's what this series will be called.... and certainly what it needs.

This is The Good God Of  Petroleum Disasters - there certainly will be more to come - but I wrote it in French in the painting because it sounds better than in English. His crown is adorned by oil rigs, pumps and towers; he spits oil through the mouth that rains down into a polluted ocean, coated in brown oil slick. The horizon is obscured by a thick fog of petrochemical fumes. The image of the god is modeled after a small bronze sculpture of Roman origin that is in The Getty Villa in Malibu, CA.
The theory around it is similar to the explanations in the preceeding posts on this blog.

The collage part is paper on paper and the actual painting is a build-up of layers of gouache, watercolor, ink, acrylic paint, graphite, pastel, charcoal, wax and whatever else I can't think of anymore. Some areas have been rubbed with steelwool to partly reveal covered layers. I like the texture in close-up. The object is the proven trick of creating enough mystique and confusion around it, so that the Divinity of it just becomes a natural conclusion.
As always, feel free to click on the images if you like to see them larger. And again, generous donations are strongly encouraged.... gods are hungry for currency or precious metals and need to be appeased, or else....!

The Oil God   mixed media and collage on paper  11.5" X 26.5"   Chris De Dier

The Oil God - detail

Who Needs Heaven?

“If a man needs a religion to conduct himself properly in this world, it is a sign that he has either a limited mind or a corrupt heart.” Ninon de l'Enclos (1620 - 1705)

This concise perspective leaves a lot uncovered about the problem of sordid human character finding refuge behind religion, but certainly continues to firmly hold its clear value to this day.

Below is a study for a painting that I am currently working on. It depicts the Holy Spirit who, after centuries of solitude in an empty Heaven, has finally committed sin, thus succumbing to the unattainable rigors of His own rules for allowance into Heaven. By doing so His white plumage turned a dark color and He is now abandoning Heaven just in time before digital obliteration prevents escape.

Out Of Heaven   mixed media and collage on paper   13" X 24"   Chris De Dier

Out Of Heaven - detail

The Creation

The left side of this work illustrates the the creation of death by the Wholy Spirit God.

     In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth.
     The Earth was rugged and covered in darkness.
     And the Wholy Spirit of God hovered in the dark,
     And God said: "Let there be Death"; and with that, death was created.
     And God saw the death, and was pleased with it.

The right side is an interpretation of digital fragmentation of such information. Different components and impulses leading to the formation of a story, passed on by generation after generation, until finally written down and accepted as "truth". But in actuality it is nothing but a belief of what may happen or what it could look like. Both are man-made and take on a life of their own. They are ideas that are translated into words, then translated into images, then translated into digital pixels.It does not matter what it is because it only matters what we believe it is.




The Creation   mixed media and collage on paper   10.5" X 32"   Chris De Dier



The Creation detail



The Pattern

The expression "weaving a story" was totally unknown to me until about five years ago when I heard it used for the first time. I still think it is peculiar, but it serves my current artistic direction perfectly.
The Bible, being a collection of stories - and considering stories are woven - I use weaving patterns as the grid on which this series of work is founded.
The second layer in this collage represents fragmentations caused by the differing and contradicting interpretations of these stories by varied factions. They are scattered, broken up and in random order because they fail to make sense in the natural order of logic reasoning that is based on scientific fact. The robotic figure represents mankind, the human-centric dogma of the Christian faith and the entire theory of Intelligent Design.

 

 

The Fragmentation Of Intelligent Design II mixed media collage 22" X 30" Chris De Dier

The Fragmentation Of Intelligent Design III mixed media collage 22" X 30" Chris De Dier