I tried to get into digital art last year, but ended up dissatisfied with the tools I had available. (Excuses, excuses…) Eventually I’ll renew my interest — I want to draw “album covers” for pieces of writing — but for now here’s the one work I brought near to completion.
Posting this is a tactic to avoid perfectionism — and publication bias? By sharing something I think is a failed experiment, it shows some of my experiments do not succeed. For better or worse, I think earnestness is a virtue. And I like the ideas around the thing.
A crow stands, mockingly, on the decaying tomb of some ancient pharaoh. His name has been spoken for the last time — a man’s second death — and the once grand pyramid is crumbling into a ruin.
This drawing went through a lot of iterations, but the concept came together with the title “Conclusions of Grandeur.” I like the pun on “delusions of grandeur” because this is a monumental tomb that only someone who thinks they’re important would want built. It is the entombed’s “conclusion” because they’re dead and buried there, and it is also the conclusion of the monument itself as it is ignored and slowly decaying.
I consider my own artistic aspirations to be something of a delusion of grandeur — “You want to be proficient at all things?” And I think it’s funny for my first artwork to be a “conclusion” — not least because I need any self-perception of grandeur to conclude so that I can approach this new domain with a beginner’s mind. It is the conclusion of the artist’s grandeur.