Detail of "The Pious Pelican" by Troy's Work Table. Carport chalking for Friday 13 February 2015.
Blood.
---
"One-legged surveillance and the stealth of a stork / Probing the shallows and measuring the depth / He catches a morsel he’s bound to regret. / Change!"
—from "Stealth of a Stork" by Wire, as found on the album Change Becomes Us.
---
"Who shot the shot to break the blood clot? / Who shot the shot to wake the dark heart?"
—from "Coagulate" by Snapcase, as found on the album End Transmission.
---
The weather today in the Puyallup was sunny and 60ºF. Not quite what one would expect in the middle of winter, but it was perfect weather to chalk.
---
I've been sketching various pictures of hearts over the past few weeks, searching through various anatomy books to see the texture of tissues and the dendritic patterns of arteries and veins. So the heart seemed something that needed to meet the sidewalk.
---
The past few days, I've been searching for various pieces of art related to the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. One of the items I discovered was a paten (the plate used to present the bread of communion) depicting the piety of the pelican. Apparently, the people of late-medieval Europe thought that the pelican would pierce its breast in order to draw blood and feed its chicks. This blood sacrifice, this "nourishing love," was thought a good metaphor for the sacrifice of Christ and equated with another metaphor of the same—the bread and wine of Holy Communion. (And these patens depicting the pious pelican were rather common in churches during the late-medieval and early-Renaissance periods.)
---
Since both images have been pecking about in my brain for a bit, I decided to marry them together, along with a bit of foliage to support both and some flowers sprouting from the wakened "dark heart."
---
View more pictures of "The Pious Pelican" HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment