Dario's Signature Sighting of the Sigh of Nature
SighNature
Dario Rivarossa
This very abstract artwork by my friend Dario reveals a very attenuated, displaced relation to a line in my story, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer: "feeling as though all of nature were as trembling with intoxication." Dario's connecting it to Milton's lines in Paradise Lost 9.782-784:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seatOr as Dario describes the image in his email: "the universal meaning of the SighNature." The image draws together several scenes in my story -- Azazello drawing blood, the Naif signing the contract in blood, and the Naif plucking the bottle from the table -- that collectively contribute to nature's own intoxication.
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.
I'd never realized that the single-fanged Azazello connotes a mosquito, but that's a signature work by Dario, whose artworks are filled with bug-eyed monsters (or 'mansters'), and what better as a sign of fallen nature than the bloodsucking mosquito?
As for the various puns at work, they're in Dario's DNA.
Labels: Dario Rivarossa, Humor, John Milton, Nature, Paradise Lost, Sign, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 5:45 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
The citation from Paradise Lost provides an amazing key: it surely 'worked' in the making of the picture, even without my being aware of it!
Azazello may be 'there' too, but the direct reference was to a hummingbird. A very nice creature, a symbol of a beautiful, innocent Nature --- but only apparently so. The bird is not very easy to recognize, but it should not 'steal the scene,' so its body is quite (too?) blurred. Azazello will have a whole illustration on his own (N. 4).
Again thanks for the wonderful way in which you illustrate my illustrations.
My 'misillustrations,' you mean?
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
your illustrious illustrations, I mean.
Ill-ustrious.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
the 3rd ustrious was better than the second, indeed
And the scustrious was better than the frustrious . . .
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Post a Comment
<< Home