51# Effigy of a Bureaucrat-Count
Painted plaster over a
wire frame.
A gaunt and intelligent
looking man with hooded eyes reflects upon the viewers gaze. He has been stolen
and is now free. The ‘Counts’ are lesser tribal and low-volume rulers within Knotsmen
influence-sphere and who have made treaty with them. These highly-lifelike
effigy’s are made as a form of contract with the Debtsmen of that race. They
are kept centrally, in ‘Forclose’ the Knotsmen capital, and counted every day.
They are never intended to leave.
52# Mating Flight
Woodcut
Gracefully carved
woodcut showing the mating flight of two of the memoryless moth-men, the
Gegenshein. The densely silver-written wings of the creatures enfold each other
as they twist together, still in flight. Each Gegenshien carries a slef derived
record of its life threaded on its smoke-grey wings and the calligraphic texts
interweave as they embrace. A knot of carries silk-wrapped bones is tugged
behind them like the bow of a kite as they drift through the dark air.
53# Dwarven Origins
Painting, oil on canvas
This painting seems to
be a dramatic but rather uninspired view of a deep city on a dark ocean. In
fact, this over-painting is camouflage. On investigation, it lifts away to show
a scene of pornographic dwarven love. Beard and pink flesh intertangle so that
it is impossible to exactly tell the gender, or, in fact the position of the
subjects. They are tenderly and erotically portrayed.
54# A Spiders Embrace
A drinking cup of
enamelled spider shell.
The ochre shell of this
cup is taken from a Trogloraptor, the child-stealing spider. Across its surface
is pictured a scene taken from the back of a Troglorpator, where it keeps the
silk-wrapped and sedated children it steals. In this case the children are not
sedated, in fact they are ******REDACTED****** each other. This cup is banned
in all cultures, even Drow. Anyone viewing the cup must save against spells or
spend a minute trying to scrub their own eyes.
55# Portrait of a slave
Oil on canvas
At first this painting
seems to be a grotesque image of a seated skeleton dressed in a silk sheet. On
closer observation you can see that the bones seem to carry flesh, translucent
transparent glasslike flesh of a beautiful woman. The multiple varicoloured
light sources used in this image were selected and arranged to make a canvas of
the flesh itself. The woman has been placed as a living prism. She stares mournfully
from the surface of the canvas.
56# Sculptures from a
temple door.
Limestone
This arch of stone
images show he judgement of the world by god. The sinful are drawn from their
places like fish, into a land of burning light. In this opulent but corrupt
country they are gorged forcibly to obesity, blinded, deafened, noses cut off
and forced into crowds. They are also watched ceaselessly from above by groups
of observing angels in the belly of a gigantic blue beast that never sleeps.
57# Statue of an
ironist.
Marble, metre and a half
high
This is an image of a
totally normal man in naked circumstances and therefore looks very strange for
the subject of a statue. He lacks any heroic proportion. Spindly limbs, large
head with aware features. A touch of this statue will open any shackle or
binding and dispel any geas or command. Even the mind-staples of the Knotsmen
will be ejected without damage.
58# The Kyriarch
Marble bust, life sized.
The subject of this bust
has a wide forehead, intelligent eyes, a small sensual mouth and a strong nose.
They look entirely normal, and quite civilised. There is nothing abstracted or idealised
about it at all. It could be the bust of
an accountant, except for the high quality. An impossible emperor, too
simple, too human too artless to ever be a destroyer of peoples.
59# Red-Berry Rapids
A mosaic, or a fragment
of a mosaic now.
Meant for the floor of a
bathhouse, where the water would flow over the bands of fractured tesserae,
making the river in the image run as well. Shows the route of a great
underground water course It begins under the sun, where dark skinned small-eyed
people (blunts heads, stained skin, big eyes with tiny pupils flitting about
like pinballs) pick the red fruit. The fruit is passed to river-raft riders who
take it underground. They pass through numerous shallow falls, the waters glow.
Rafts capsize and crews die at every stage, the red fruit is lost in the dark.
Past pale fish and pale pigs, rapids, poisoned birdshit island swarming with
nightmare alpha-bugs. Past and through forgotten cities where half sunk statues
to unknowable gods make reefs upon the foaming blur. Then through the hopfish
spawning grounds where sailors are abducted from the deck by flocks of fleeting
gnawing fish, the ambassadorial swamps
where educated alligators converse and snatch ships down. Past the
fallen lighthouse where they say sometimes the antiphoenix burns. To the
whale-wracked shores of the nightmare sea and the islands there where beautiful
sorcerous women with iron eyes wait for three day-old fruit before it spoils.
60# Apocalypse Tapestries
Woven from human hair.
The underverse is just
deeper and longer than the oververse and with a stranger memory and the
cataclysms of the known world are just the pulse of the underworld, renewed by
the destruction from above. A birth of ashes. These tapestries show numerous
human apocalyptic events. The sun plays a part, and the sea, and light, ships
there are and angels inverted in the dark. In each instance the survivors are
shown going underground. Sometimes willingly. Sometimes when, under darkened
skies, pale armies rise up from the gaps in the world to hunt the remains of
civilisation, abduct, enslave and consume them and, in whatever form, bring
them below.
61# Curiosity
Metalwork.
An image of curiosity
embodies as a man, winged, shrouded, with a hooded lamp.
Cool hat, awesome hair,
face hidden. Dangerous. The initial impression of carved wood is actually a
dozen metals, forged and worked together as one. Copper, iron, bronze, tin,
etched titanium and more. The lightness and apparent improvisation of this
piece is actually the result of insane levels of planning. Metals with
different tolerances and melting points have been worked as one apparent whole,
yet they can only have been assembled slowly over time, and with great
difficulty. Impossible to tell which races work this is, depth of metallic lore
suggests dwarven or duergar but the effect is too light and fanciful.
62# Ge(g)eor Lilven. Spasm-Baron; Neyvgaber
Chalk on black slate
The slightest touch
could smudge this perfect sketch. Practice for a painting, lost or unmade. The
Spasm-Baron himself is a middle-aged male, face carefully delineated clothes
roughly laid out, furs and a skullcap, ruthless, intelligent. Awake. Aware.
63# Selenium Bloom with
Moon-Bronze Rose.
Watercolour on dogskin
Reason for the unusual
choice of canvas not know, possible Archen artist or Archean influence as
painting exhibits colours beyond the expected visible spectrum.
A small clutch of
selenium flowers from the gardens of the Archeans, subtlety and exactness of
the petals and leaves shown with rare and obsessive grace, the barely-opening
flowers, the slenderness and near luminosity of the leaves, catching yet also
providing light. Brilliantly implied humming crackle of light-negative alpha
waves. This picture slightly radioactive
64# Lamenters Hunting.
Watercolour and chalk on
graphite tablet.
Lamenters hunting in
their own caverns, unusual as lamenters would usually hunt in the overworld at
night (where they do not call and are not remarked upon).
A small flock of two or
three birds caught spiralling through the air, all trying to catch one
translucent cave cricket that has presumably leapt up into a darkened space.
Drawn from life under
conditions of enormous danger. Lamenters are rarely seen like this and there
are very few bird pictures underground so this one is rare.
65# Female Harvester
Oil on canvas
A naked woman wearing
only sandals and a basket over her shoulder.
Sticking out is the foot
of a human being She carries in her hand, another hand, this one separated from
its owner. She seems peaceful.
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