What The Fire Said: Frankenstein

What The Fire Said

What The Fire Said is the portal for my own art and writing. It is necessarily a work in progress, and you are welcome to return anytime to see what has been added here.

In my header you will see both contemporary calibration dials and centuries-old symbols used in the practice of alchemy. My art tends to operate at the interface between such extremes: between our shared distant past and an unknown far future, between the realities of history and the at-times greater realities that lie over the threshold in the world of myth. At these extremes science and magic, myth and history turn into each other, become indistinguishable from each other – as in the far future they well might. ~ Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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What The Fire Said by David Bergen a.k.a. Hawkwood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License covering all written and visual material at: http://whatthefiresaid.blogspot.nl/.

These personally created artworks remain the property of the © David Bergen Studio. The terms of my above Creative Commons License allow for re-posting of these works on the express condition that they remain unaltered (that is: with my embedded © credit attached) and that the context is non-commercial. Please respect my art.

Hawkwood (David Bergen)

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Ownership of any copyrighted material appearing either as visual, written or audio files on this weblog, remains with the holders of the original copyright, and no further claim to such material by the author of this site is intended, and need not be inferred. It is believed that the limited use of any web resolution images for the purposes of identification and critical commentary qualifies as fair use.

Copyright of any material credited to Hawkwood remains with the author. The registered creative commons license below permits further use and distribution of Hawkwood's work subject to the three conditions: (1) The user attributes the work to 'Hawkwood', (2) The context is non-commercial, (3) The work remains unaltered. A link back to this weblog is appreciated.

For me, the true horror of this story is not the creature created by Frankenstein, but the unrelenting, remorseless tragedy of the unfolding events. Reading Mary Shelley's narrative is like being on a speeding train that you know is going to crash, but which you cannot get off. One thing that her protagonist Victor Frankenstein and I share, however, is a fondness for the works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and I have here incorporated the title page of his Occult Philosophy into my image. Agrippa's writings had a huge impact on 16th-century Europe. Albrecht Dürer was impressed enough by them to include one of Agrippa's illustrations - the magic square of Jupiter - in his masterpiece engraving Melencolia 1. Agrippa found a new audience with the 19th-century Romantics, and I feel the sonority of all that history when I open the pages of the hefty volume of his collected works that is on my own bookshelf.

The central image of the creature is my own oil painting, with Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical studies and Robert Fludd's universal human proportions also included.

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