Necromancer

Dec. 4

I was reading a collected works of Gogol wherein I happened upon a story called 'Viy,' to memory, it was to do with a student of either religion or the arcane or some esoteric practice amalgamating them, being called upon by some chieftain to do him a solid and help send his nefarious daughter's deceased soul to the afterlife peacefully so that the witchcraft she was up to her neck in does not spill over and cause reality-warping horrific shenanigans and bring ruin to his tribe and perhaps the locale as a whole. The young man agrees and is told that he must spend three nights purifying the church where she is yet to be served her final rites and set off into the afterlife. The story is beautiful and striking, so it should be enjoyed with a thoroughness that only an initial, relatively untainted read can provide.

I based this painting [if I can call it that] on some of the imagery that the masterful wordsmith Nikolai Gogol summoned from a place that I did not recognize my consciousness could access, and so I sought to put pen to paper, but caressing dimensions that Nikolai may not have had the skills to access, or so I thought to do.

I wanted to set scene within a chapel with stained-glass windows and rows of pews where a thick, menacing, mephitic supernatural smog would take form and assail this witch-hunting exorcist who may be warded to the teeth in preparation to do battle with the deepest of inconceivable fiends. The beast beyond dimension would strike at the man, piercing his defenses with an ease that mocks him, immune to the rosaries and wards, crosses, hallowed salts formed into circles in the hopes of purifying a space. All of this invaded with a fiendish and casual aggression of a toothy monster that emerges from its own smoke and tentacles...

The point was the illustrate a situation where a spiritualist was too late to recognize that he was too deep in a place to hope for escape or salvation, and that maybe, just maybe, his brand of protections were predicated on lies and deceit and thereby held no power over any manner of otherworldly threat, let alone the mundane and the benign.

What I made was a lousy and confused mess of poorly conceived and designed characters that became too noisy while violating sensible rules of composition. I think I rushed this one, not for lack of time, but for an overall lack of involvement in the work and the process, despite my eagerness to try representing one of my favorite writer's works. The lack of care produced a lack of quality.

The idea was good, but the execution is shameful. I feel that there is a lesson in this one, and that learning it in explicit detail would be a good thing to carry into the future. One positive thing: my friend, Bianca, commented that the monster was striking because it had the teeth of a herbivore, crushing and rounded, making it seem uncanny.