Tucson All Souls Procession 09

We walked in the Tucson All Souls Procession last night.  We took pictures this year – here’s my set, and from any of these you can link to Flickr’s ALL SOULS PROCESSION group and see more photos from other people.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonfangs/sets/72157622765310126/

A big crowd this year, and more spectators than usual.  This event is 20 years old and began as a small procession (so obscure that I never heard of it during the two years I lived in Tucson in the early 90s).   I’ve only attended for the past four years, and during that time it has become a major, heavily-publicized event.  It’s actually TWO events – the procession and the finale.  The procession is open to anyone and is a fascinating showcase for creativity of all kinds – costumes and masks, sculpture, carettas (mobile altars, floats or art), ritual objects, music, and dance.  As was probably inevitable, it appears to be gradually losing its original focus (a memorial procession to honor dead friends, family, and ancestors) and becoming a more generalized public costume party, but there is still enough of the “community deathwalk” aspect to be very powerful.  It starts slowly and often rather solemn.  But when the mob makes the “Underworld passage” through the Fourth Avenue underpass, it conjures the spirit of the Oldest River with a cacophony of howls, ululations, thundering drums, and clanging bells…and all the invisible things riding the night air are drawn through in a gust of wind, scattering on the other side as the crowd becomes quieter and more relaxed, and people move a little faster and more freely. 

The Urn heads the procession, but the burning of the Urn no longer serves any ritual purpose, since the Finale has evolved into a theatrical spectacle of its own that includes firespinners, acrobats, and musicians.  The logistics of this event make for a very long wait in the crowd after the end of the procession.  I have seen it once, but I am not fond of theatrical performance for its own sake, so I prefer to just enjoy the procession and go home.

Animal Skulls for Trade

I have decided to release some natural history relics that I’ve collected over the years.  These animal skulls are available for trade – make an offer for all or just one.  (I like antlers, small handknitted objects, nice stones and other raw materials…I’m a picky but enthusiastic trader with diverse interests.)  All skulls show some weathering and are not uniformly colored, but they are in very nice condition considering that they were found in nature.  For spiritual use, curios, models for nature drawing…you decide.

Opossum, Raccoon, Red Fox, Gray Fox

1.  Opossum Skull (Woodford Co., KY) – very old, large male.  Missing some teeth – still has one canine and a few others.

2.  Raccoon Skull (Cheyenne, WY) – big male, excellent condition with all teeth. 

3.  Red Fox Skull (Richmond, VA) – missing one canine; no lower jaw.

4.  Gray Fox Skull (Tucson, AZ) – missing a few teeth from lower jaw.

I have a few other bones etc. as well.  If interested, please reply by e-mail through my website, NOT in the blog comments.  U.S. trades only, please.  Thank you!

Letting in the Light

I’ve been sidelined by illness for a couple of weeks, but am back at work now.  I looked for ways to restore balance around the house, and decided to cut a window in the door to my studio.  I keep the door closed because some of my more primitive cats will spray and wreak all kinds of destruction if they are allowed to enter unsupervised.  Now I can keep out the naughty cats and still allow air and light to flow freely.  Photo shows the skylight over my desk, viewed from the hall.

Skylight Window

Ironwing Tarot Update

Ironwing Tarot  full 78-card deck with book and bag:

SOLD OUT as of today.

 

22 card MAJOR ARCANA set (square-cornered cards, no book or bag) is STILL AVAILABLE.

How to Draw Fire

The title phrase has shown up in my blog stats every day for about a year. 

What does fire look like?  Regardless of the art medium or style that you are using, you need to be familiar with what fire looks like and how it behaves.  Here’s the photo gallery at wildlandfire.com, the ultimate online resource for PICTURES OF FIRE.  Under the first heading, “Fire Photo Pages”, you’ll find 40 pages, each with several photos.  There are more photos at the bottom of the page under “Incidents by Name and Year”.

Symbols for Fire:  The Ironwing Tarot uses several symbolic techniques to represent fire in small ink drawings.  It shows fire, sparks, or smoke on 27 cards (Major Arcana and Spikes).  Many of these are rather subtle, since fire isn’t usually the main subject of the card.

Painting Fire:  Fire is surprisingly easy to render effectively in mineral pigments, especially against a dark background.   This egg tempera sketch shows a whitetail deer scapula painted in charred bone, with a smoky background painted with forest fire charcoal.  The fiery figure is painted in yellow ochre with red ochre accents.  Commercial transparent watercolor would offer more color options, but the idea is the same – keep it simple, with thin glazes of intense color against a darker, more neutral background.

Scapulimancy Fire

Here is a rather stylized egg tempera painting of fire glowing in the earth, surrounded by charred thorns:

Fire and Thorns

Previous posts on this blog that include fire paintings include a painting of an iron pomegranate with fire inside (rendered in realgar, not yellow ochre), and a painting of a pomegranate made of fire.

http://ironwing.wordpress.com/2007/07/11/clay-iron-and-realgar/

http://ironwing.wordpress.com/2007/08/17/walking-close-to-home/

GREEN fire?  Yes, when copper ore is heated (or copper metal that has developed a green patina), it gives off green flames.  This watercolor miniature was painted in iron oxides and copper ores (red cuprite, green malachite, and blue azurite).

Copper Fire Bowl

Drilled Pebbles

The Tucson gem shows are in town.  Years ago, this annual event was a total-immersion experience for me – a mad week of looking, visiting, buying, selling, trading, and discovery that inspired me for the rest of the year.  But the shows have changed, though there are still tons of minerals and gems to delight the eye.  Dealers are scattered through more venues around town, prices and expectations have risen, and the whole affair is more serious and less fun.  I haven’t made a sale or a trade in several years, so I don’t buy as much.  The friends I had among the dealers have long since died or quit coming, my own interests and projects have diversified, and I have more cats, more responsibility, and less spare change than I used to.  But I still visit a few shows each year, to admire minerals and buy a few tools, a strand of beads or a cabochon, and perhaps a rock or two.  This year my first stop was the outdoor show at Tucson Electric Park, a sprawling village of little white tents, RVers with tables full of rocks, and the diverse (and sometimes just weird) collection of dealers in the Main Tent.  Made my traditional visit to Kent’s Tools.  The store is a Tucson landmark, with an enormous inventory of new and used tools of all kinds, and their booth at the gem show has a huge array of jeweler’s supplies and lapidary equipment.  This time I bought some little diamond core drills for poking holes in rocks.

Peridot Pendants

These two pendants are for an iron necklace.  Total length is 1.75″ and 1.5″.  They are very large specimens of facet-grade peridot (the gem name for the mineral olivine) from the mines at Peridot, Arizona.  Both are natural rough stones – the one on the right has a natural rounded, frosted, slightly oily-looking polish.

Drilled Pebbles

These two are stones that I collected.  They will eventually adorn knife chains or jewelry.  Both are about one inch long.  On the left is a brown chert beach pebble from the Outer Banks.  The other one is a transluent chalcedony ventifact from Wyoming, naturally sculpted and polished by windblown silt.  The little white hydrated spot is opaque and moonlike, and both pebbles are much more attractive in person.

Healing Impy

Impy, our seven year old “Black Cat #1″ , got very sick a couple of weeks ago.  He has already used up several of his nine lives – he was a rescued stray who had lived outside for several months before we trapped him in 2003.  He arrived with an abscessed bite wound on his shoulder that needed surgery, and was partially blind due to taurine deficiency from malnutrition.  A year later he survived a near-fatal bout of pancreatitis.  His recent illness was just as frightening, since he quit eating and showed signs of dementia, worsening blindness,  and depression.  He tested positive for toxoplasmosis.  After a few days of antibiotic treatment, he is much better, and we have our happy, active, loving, mischievous kitty back!

Impy

In Memoriam:  2004 TSUNAMI

Dark Moon

Beluga sleeps beside me at night, with my arm around him so I will know instantly if he has a seizure.  He usually has them on the Dark Moon and Full Moon, and last night was no exception.  We were half awake anyway, listening to the rain, when he started twitching.  I keep a towel and an extra pillow beside the bed, so I quickly wrapped up and cushioned him while he thrashed and hissed for a couple of minutes.  After he calmed down, we went back to sleep.  He’s very quiet today, but the cool, cloudy weather makes all the cats sleepy.  On some nights I am able to follow his dreams, which always lead down into earthy places, mysterious dark passages, and eventually towards a twilight landscape that shares aspects of my own inner world and his unique feline perspective.  He is a master of the Underworld journey.  This place appears often in my dreams at this time of year - a compelling and intensely familiar place to disappear from the world, half forbidden and accessible only with “permission”, both a refuge and a trap, comforting and frightening, filled with inviting visions, yet bearing the dusty finality of the grave.  It is a shaman’s view, a long way from the typical (and to me, alien) religious ideal of celestial light and detachment that is celebrated in major religions and New Age thought.  The Upper World is cold, crystalline, spacious, and terrifyingly empty – a place of awesome power, to journey occasionally for specific reasons, but not anywhere to live or leave one’s mind for long, and certainly not an ultimate destination.  The Underworld draws its warmth and complexity from the secret patterns of life, including one’s own body, which is why it feels like Home.

I am fortunate to have found a true Teacher in a tiny black cat whose life is a miracle.  I recently bought several CDs of Medieval pilgrim songs and dances, mostly written in the 1400s in honor of the Black Virgin at the Spanish monastery of Montserrat.  Beluga likes them and listens very carefully to the rhythms…and he “walks time” very quickly around the outer edge of the maze, sometimes following the square edges, and other times in a circle.  Odd to watch him placing his little paws very deliberately, almost running as he follows the drumbeat with steps as precise as a windup toy, pausing to find his walking step again when the song ends.

A few months ago I bought a moleskine sketchbook.  I had thought them simply a pretentious fad item until I actually saw one.  I realized that this is the kind of drawing book that I had been wanting since I was in middle school and first became seriously interested in scientific illustration.  The smooth, cream-colored paper takes ink lines without tearing or bleeding, which is essential for ink drawing but nearly impossible to find even in “professional” drawing paper (it was no longer an issue once I switched to scratchboard).  The whole notebook has a 19th century air – a combination of simplicity and “ivory tower” refinement that I found irresistible.  So I bought a couple of them, and am filling one with cat sketches, like this one of Beluga circling:

Copper Cat Mask

Just finished this hammered copper cat mask as I begin to prepare for Tucson’s All Souls Procession on November 2.  This procession to honor the dead is an annual event that grows bigger and livelier each year, with a mood somewhere between Mardi Gras and Burning Man.  There are hundreds of people walking (many dressed in skeleton costumes), some of them pulling carettas (wheeled shrines) or carrying giant puppet heads.  Also in the noisy crowd are drummers, dancers, musicians, incense-bearers, and others, turning Tucson’s grim, ugly downtown streets into a chaotic urban gate to the Underworld.  The grand finale is the burning of the Urn, a giant vessel filled with people’s prayers, photos, names of the dead, and other things to be released from the previous year.

The official Tucson All Souls Procession website:  http://www.allsoulsprocession.org/

The mask is 6 inches wide and carefully designed and shaped to fit me so I can wear it in the procession or while visiting neighbors on Halloween…and it looks cool hanging on the wall, too.

Double Pod Amulet

Today I finished this pendant with two “nesting” iron pods.  It’s simpler than the four pod tri-metal version that I made earlier this year, but powerful in the same way, and makes a similar rattling sound.  It was going to be a clapper for one of my triangular bells, but it is so nicely wearable by itself that I decided to leave it as it is, and come up with something else for the bell.  An appropriate amulet for this time of year, when the pomegranates are ripening and splitting open, the black devil’s claw pods are ripening as the vines wither, and the dark places in the earth call the most invitingly, and I seek out forest hollows, shadowy cliffs and rock outcrops, and water creeping half-hidden among tors.