Work in Progress
Set of digital sketches for work-in-progress: Pica Mystica, oil on canvas, 19 x 37 in. Work on this began over the summer (July 2026) and continues into the Fall.
The process: Over the past couple of years I have worked on dozens of versions of the transfusion theme. Thematically, this obsession is presumably based in part on the Christian preoccupation with blood/guilt/cleansing.
Smoker Transfusion with Raven
Smoker Transfusion 1
Magpie Transfusion
Transfusion in Rose Garden
Infancy legends: The Transfusion
Babel Transfusion with Syringe
Above: a set of sketches from my “transfusion” archive: just a small sample of such studies from the past couple of years. The bird which appears in some of the sketches (thought of here as a magpie) is another aspect of the image to which I have given considerable thought. A key aspect of this is divination. In antiquity, birds were closely associated with divinatory practice; ancient Greek and Roman culture, for example, had a well-developed practice of orinthomancy: divining the direction of fate by observing the flight patterns of birds.
