Saturday, January 05, 2013

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 seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.
Or 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.

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.

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6 Comments:

At 6:16 AM, Blogger ilTassista Marino said...

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.

 
At 6:58 AM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

My 'misillustrations,' you mean?

Jeffery Hodges

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At 3:43 PM, Blogger ilTassista Marino said...

your illustrious illustrations, I mean.

 
At 4:20 PM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Ill-ustrious.

Jeffery Hodges

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At 6:09 PM, Blogger ilTassista Marino said...

the 3rd ustrious was better than the second, indeed

 
At 6:38 PM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

And the scustrious was better than the frustrious . . .

Jeffery Hodges

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