What The Fire Said: Portraits

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)

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.

Nienke and the Scattered Crests

Some years ago Nienke was kind enough to be my model for a series of period costume paintings which I was working on at that time. She fell readily into the period of each costume, from the early 1800's to the 1920's, but it is a costume outside of that series which I have chosen for my portrait of her. This Japanese kimono is a copy of an 18th-century Edo period design known as 'scattered crests', in which the clan crests are printed randomly over the fabric, and Nienke's quiet poise complemented the busy design perfectly.

Speaking in Tongues

Ma femme.

There is always new life. An end is only an end in the sense that it brings with it the opportunity for something else to begin. The life courage to begin again, both for various reasons and in various situations, is something that this woman has plenty of, and gives me every reason to feel both proud and honoured that she has chosen to be my partner in life.

Sometimes a portrait can be built around a single small accessory. A painting in acrylic paints on cold-pressed board. The cold-press method of manufacture preserves the paper's grain, and gives the paint a textured 'tooth' when it is applied.

Jan S.

A drawing in pencil and acrylic wash. Jan was a professional model who came to pose for me in my London studio. She is here costumed as the 'Abyssinian maid' from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. Jan was, to put it frankly, one of the most beautiful women I have seen, and she had great enthusiasm and energy for what I wished to express with her character.

"If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Ay! and what then?" ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sha Sha Higby

An oil painting of my favourite contemporary performance artist. Adapted from a photo by Albert Hollander. At times a mask can be as revealing as seeing a person's face, and Sha Sha's use of masks in her intricate sculpted costumes powerfully combines mythic drama and personal vision.

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