Tabulae Mortuae III (Archives XIII)

Clich to increase; copyright Gert van Dijk

 It is with some trepidation that I show you this particular dead painting. (If you wish to see more, just use the search function to find 'Archives'.) It is one of the oldest in the series of paintings that later became the Furaha universe. The subject is neither thought out well nor painted well. The sky used to be ochre, but I secondarily, after a year or so, decided to paint it over with bluish tints to improve the demarcation of foreground and background. That helped a bit, but not enough. I admit that I have now decreased the contrast of the background digitally to improve the sense of depth in the painting.

At the time of painting I was still enamoured of ballonts (there are many posts on this blog about 'ballonts'). I was exploring what you could do with them. So here is a ballont species with the ability to hover a bit above the ground, tiptoeing from stem to stem if it chose to do so. If endangered, it was supposed to be able to release its hold and shoot upwards like a cork in water. I did not stop to think how such animals would be able to regulate the upwards force of their balloon. Perhaps it could contract its bladder forcefully, decreasing its volume and compressing the gas inside.

Anyway, I remember that the tree (?) in the background started out as a gigantic slug-like creature moving across the landscape with interesting mushroom-shaped organisms on top. When the painting was redone, I transformed it into a sessile lifeform, but the mushrooms stayed. These can obviously tilt or bend in such a way that they deflect the wind. Although I have no idea what these mushroom organs are actually for, I still like the idea of them forming a buffer against the wind.

You will not be surprised to learn that the tomatl did not make it into the modern, more sensible, Furaha universe. Now they do, and the quality of the paintings have improved too, or so I like to think. It was fun to simply paint whichever shapes suggested themselves, without wondering whether they made any sense or not. Progress...