What The Fire Said: Skeleton Skeletron

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)

Creative Commons License

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)

Disclaimer

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.

The central image is a detail of a much larger design of human skulls which I originally created to use for the poison star sequence in my Revelations video. The full-sized image contains hundreds of skulls. It took considerable time and patience to put together, and was inspired by the Sedlec Ossuary, the small chapel in the Czech Republic. The chapel is estimated to contain the bones of around sixty thousand skeletons, mostly of victims of war and the Black Death, all of them arranged by the monks in spectacular displays, from chandeliers to coats-of-arms. It is now one of the most visited tourist attractions in the country.

It was only when I had completed this image that I realized I had managed to combine four of my favourite sources: the engravings of Albrecht Dürer, the works of Athanasius Kircher, and Theodore De Bry's engravings for the works of Robert Fludd, together with one of Leonardo's anatomical drawings. In Leonardo's day the Church forbade any dissection of corpses as prying into the works of God. The artist bribed guards to work at night on the bodies of executed criminals, all by the light of fitfully-guttering candles. That's commitment for you.

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