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Welcome
- Hawkwood
- Author, artist, designer and neo-Renaissance Hermeticist. I like to consider that creative activity should aspire to the condition of talismanic magic. Other methods are possibly equally as effective, although perhaps not as cool.
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)
DRACULA: Darkness Rising
My own version of Dracula, featuring Bram Stoker's actual text. Clicking on the image will transport you to Transylvania. Right click opens a new tab. View it full-screen in HD, and bring garlic - a lot.
Shadows in Eden
There's lost lands, heresies, Noah's Ark, heroes of ancient Sparta, forbidden fruit and a variety of Eves on my other weblog. Clicking on the image will take you there (right click opens a new tab).
Alchemy
Alchemy is all about transformation, and transformation can take many forms. Life-changing experiences – falling in love, spiritual revelations, or suffering loss – offer in their own ways opportunities to transform, to work our own alchemy upon ourselves. This was the true goal of the old alchemists. And sometimes, every now and then, we can end up with gold.
Ancient Voices
We do not always have faces to go with the familiar names from the Ancient World, but with some thought and imagination – and with an occasional written description by their contemporaries to guide us – possible appearances can be resurrected. These imagined portraits can serve to bring a sense of immediacy to those voices from centuries ago who continue to speak to us, both through their preserved writings and through their achievements.
Where I Live
Some time ago I created a series of photos documenting the woods near where I live. The only rule I gave myself was that all the photos should be taken just a few minutes’ walk from my front door. Now I have revisited those original photos, reshaping them as if through the veil of memory: a record, not of these scenes as they are, but as they felt when I was there.
Futures
When we think of portraying the future we probably tend to think of science fiction, with its bleak dystopias and its starships sliding through the trackless darks. But these scenarios generally depict what can be extrapolated several decades into our existing world. What if instead we project ourselves hundreds or even thousands of years into the future? Would we even recognize what we have become?
Gothic Classics
Some years ago Penguin Books asked me to create cover art for new editions of the 19th-century gothic classics. I recently selected three of these (Frankenstein, The Masque of the Red Death and The Phantom of the Opera) to repaint digitally. The artwork for a fourth title (see my album Dracula) evolved into my own illustrated version of that story.
Histories
From the forced closure of the last temple of the Ancient Egyptian gods on the orders of the Holy Roman Emperor Justinian to the strange enigma of the nineteenth century foundling Kaspar Hauser: incidents from history both far-reaching in their dramatic consequences and humanly poignant. And at times this album reaches beyond the fringes of history to civilizations even more remote from our own.
Metal Dreams
It has been my pleasure to create work which draws its inspiration from listening to the Swedish metal band Tiamat, although these images have less to do with a direct interpretation of the lyrics, and more to do with the way in which the titles of the tracks and the music resonate in the mind. Fan art of a sort, if you will.
Mythic Worlds
The flight of Icarus, the song of the sirens, the riddle of the sphinx: stories from the Ancient World which all have endured for millennia. Today, to describe something as a ‘myth’ has come to mean that its veracity is questionable. But these ancient myths survive exactly because the truths which they contain run so deep.
Portraits
The faces of some of those who are known to me, and of some whom I would like to have known. But not all portraits need to be of faces. Portraits are intended to express something about a person, to show some essence of who that person is. And that essence can at times reveal itself in a person's hands, in a gesture, or even through a mask.
Prophesies and Oracles
We seek to lift the veil between ourselves and the future. We want to know, not just what is happening, but what will happen in times to come. Consulting oracles, heeding prophesies and those who pronounce them, appears to offer a way for us to do that. But can we rely on the claims made by such prophesies, and what drives our need to know what the future might hold for us?
Separate Realities
Nieríca, a term from the Native Mexican Huichol language, indicates a mystic door or portal – between life and death, between this world and another, or perhaps more succinctly: between different realities. If there are indeed multiple realities (as both Carlos Castaneda’s writings and recent science suggests), is one reality any more 'real' than another?
Sirens
Some say that all things are really illusion. Others maintain that all that we see - even with our mind's eye - is real, and shows us glimpses of different realities. The siren can be found at the interface between illusion and reality, and her skill lies in deception. Even when we suspect the illusion, the siren's song, seductive and distracting, persuades us otherwise.
The Mystic Feminine
Goddess, muse, bearer of new life: the feminine spirit has been portrayed with a seemingly-endless fascination for this great mystery. The oldest depictions of this mystic feminine date back some forty thousand years into our past. Ishtar, Kali, Sekhmet, Hera: she is many goddesses who are really one continuous being: the Mystic Feminine.
What The Fire Said
Jump into the fire, run with the wolves, scuff through clouds of high cirrus: my poems and writings are mostly about transformation, about shape-shifting to become something other than who we think we are. Perhaps these visions offer us a glimpse of who we really are when we manage to let go of our everyday selves.
Zeno and Me
The Ancient Greek philosopher Zeno apparently could defy logic and halt an arrow in flight. In this album you can read why Zeno's feat so intrigues me. This also is the place where you can read something about me, and for those interested, where I describe the various techniques which I use to create the art which you see here.
Featured Paintings
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"I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd, so I quietly got my polyg... -
"A warrior chooses a path with heart, any path with heart, and follows it; and then he rejoices and laughs. He knows because ... -
Asherah was the consort of the northern Canaanite storm god El, known as Baal (a title meaning 'Lord'). When El evolved ... -
Having run away from home at the tender age of twelve, Mary lived a dissolute life in the city of Alexandria for the next seventeen ... -
Acrisius, king of Argos, fearing from a prophesy that the future son of his daughter Danaë will be his slayer, ensures that hi... -
The ocean too has its pathways, even when these pathways are not defined with the same sensory perceptions as those of the land. Tra... -
The story of Pandora, the first woman on Earth, who opened the forbidden box and so released all of the sorrows and misfortunes into... -
It has become something of a tradition to assume that Bram Stoker’s inspiration for the character of Dracula stemmed from the exploits o... -
Her name means ’The Beautiful One Approaches’. She was the wife and the queen of the heretic king Akhenaten, reigning in the new capital w... -
It was, of course, asking for trouble. When Queen Cassiopeia made the claim that she considered herself more beautiful even than t...
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Creative Commons License
Works credited to Hawkwood are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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