Scorpion
Skies
7’
– 0” x 6’ – 0”
Acylic
paint on my living room wall
London,
Ontario
September,
2010
Jim
Kogelheide
Scorpion
Skies
To begin, I will say that readers of this story are
in for a treat… There are several
aspects to this story, since I’m telling it now… in 2024, and because of this,
I have to share links to other art stories, as well… so you will see how one
artwork influenced another artwork which then influenced Scorpion Skies! This is what I love about being an artist - one
idea leads to another idea then it evolves to create other ideas!
So… a day or so after Christmas 2023, I posted this
photo that Devon took of mommy snuggling up in the housecoat that Santa brought
to her, on Facebook…
One of my Facebook friends made a few comments about
how happy Jo’ looks and how warm the housecoat looks and then she surprised me
by asking about ‘the circle’ in the background… wondering what it is. To answer her, I came to this webpage to find
a link to the story behind it… and there was no story. So, then, I went
googling in my archives to a blog I created many years ago. 15 minutes later, I had found a few stories
about the mural and lots of photos.
Since I’ve yet to document this art creation on this
website… I’m going to share the story now…
I guess that a good place to start is to share the
first few sentences of a blog I wrote entitled ‘Happy Birthday – Here’s a House’…
“We took possession of our
new (old) home on November, Friday the 13th – a very lucky day, indeed! Two
days later it was Joanne’s birthday – a day neither one of us will ever
forget!!!”
This happened in 2009! To this day, I still joke about how Jo’ got a
house as a birthday present! Haha!
Soon… our house was set up and winter had arrived,
keeping me from working outside. That
was fine with me! To really ‘make this home ours’, I began to create a wall
mural in our living room.
A week or so later, I had been commissioned to create a pet portrait.
This is the completed painting… and it took me 55 hours to finish! It’s one of my fastest art creations to be completed! The reason for this was simple… the person who commissioned me wanted the painting completed before Christmas. I’ve shared the link to this artwork for you to enjoy the full story.
In this story, you will see how this painting is
connected to Scorpion Skies. Here’s an excerpt…
“When I
started to paint the gravel beach in the background, I found myself really
attracted to the random shapes and blobs that represented the gravel! I
took this inspiration and used in the wall mural that I was also painting
during this time…”
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“This is one of the
reasons why I so enjoy being an artist! I love how one process for
creating textures can inspire new processes for creating textures. If I
had not been painting Digger’s portrait and been inspired by the texture of the
gravel beach, would the inside texture of my mural be as it is??”
Since I love sharing
my art adventures on Facebook… and since this mural took so long to paint… I
had quite a few photos to share over the next several months. It’s funny seeing then all together, over
this time span, as you see me with short hair… longer hair… short hair again!
Haha! I also had some fun with these
photos… I started the series with me
just standing there and then I thought that it would be comical to make it look
like I’m pushing the border of the painting to the right to show more of the
mural… and then I get downright ridiculous with the next couple of photos! Here is that series…
At this point, you can see that I’m nearing the end
of this mural and that I finally did decide on the other elements I wanted to
include in this mural… you can see them in them in these last few photos. So, let me tell you about all of this… but
first… let me show you some more of my funny Facebook posts…
While I paint, I think of many things.
One day, while I was painting one of the large circles, I was thinking about
how painting is a form of yoga! Yoga is about movement of the body and drawing
consciousness to the mind. Yoga practices can take long periods of meditative
actions in a calming environment.
As I continued to paint my way around
the circle I noticed all the positions that I put my body in and all the
different muscles that I was using in each position. Since it was taking me
about forty-five minutes to paint each circle, I became aware that I was
performing my own form of yoga!
One of the other things that I started
thinking about, was how funny it would be to create a series of photos showing
all the different poses that I must get into as I paint my circles! And so, I
did!!!!
OK… on with explaining the other
elements of this mural…
First up… the second texture inside my
circles... aka – the sun…
The inside of the sun was inspired, as I
said earlier, by evolving the idea of the textures I used in the pet
portrait. As you can imagine, this took
A LOT of time to paint. When it was time
to add some more texture to the next series of rings in the sun, I simply
changed to a different texture…
My hope was that this new texture would
be quicker to paint. Boy, was I wrong!!
In fact, it took quite a bit longer! To
give you an idea about the time involved…
In this photo, you can see that I still
have a bit of texture to add to the lower right side of the sun circles. It took me six hours to complete this rather
small area! Haha! Just wait til you see
what textures I use next… they took even longer!!
The rest of the mural explained…
I mentioned that I wanted to add some
kind of, “organic symbolism filling the rest… to represent the
life giving forces of Nature!” I was
toying with the idea of adding some kind of plant to fill in the rest of the
wall space. Since I love gardening, this
seemed like a great concept to explore.
During the time when I was mulling over a few ideas,
I happened to watch a TV show about space and our solar system of planets…
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Take a look at how the planets are depicted showing
how the sun lights up the side that’s facing the sun. We see this all the time when we look at our
moon during its different phases. Well… this gave me an idea!!!
I thought that I would turn this mural into a
depiction of our solar system. I would
create all the planets to show only ‘the light side’ of them.
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By doing this, I would have a series of arc like
shapes. I thought that these arc shapes
looked like leaves of a plant. So… when
I put them all together, it would look like a plant made up of our planets and
I would be able to fulfill my original inspiration of creating some kind of, “organic symbolism filling the rest…
to represent the life giving forces of Nature!”
Since music plays such a significant part in my life and my art, you can assume correctly that while I did all of this painting that I was listening to a lot of records! One song also played a part of this mural's creation. Please enjoy this really cool video...
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To create my ‘plant of planets’ I decided to have
them all touching… one planet arc would touch the next planet arc, etc. I laughed when the next idea popped into my
head…
I thought that if I also included all the moons of
each planet that they would look like the fruits (or berries) that would be
produced by this solar plant! Haha! With
the moon fruits, I decided to keep them circular… not arched like the
planet/plant leaves. I then had to
research just how many moons each planet had.
I was rather shocked with what I learned. I had never really thought
about all of these moons and I was surprised with how many there actually are!
I took it a few steps further when I developed my
colour scheme. I used the colours from
the sun in the plant and the fruits - the sun colours were inspired by the
hardwood floors of our living room… so they are burnt or deep reds. To the plants I added a lot of deep green and
to the fruits I added a lot of deep blue… like blueberries! These colours are VERY hard to see in any of
my photos… but they are there!
Here’s a close up… and you can see that I used a variety
of tones of each hue/colour to accentuate the designs!!
Remember when I early complained about how long it
took me to paint this texture…
Well… painting the textures for these plant planets
took even longer! You can see that I
used an even thinner paint stroke and I really focused on creating these lines with
as little space between them as I could!
Yes I am a glutton for punishment! Haha!
The concept that came to my mind was rather simple…
I was honouring God… our Creator… the life forces of universal existence…
whatever name you wish to use! Since our
Creator created the universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our planets… I
painted a texture to symbolize his/her/its involvement, by making this texture
look like a fingerprint!
You’ll notice that the date of ‘Almost finished’
(above) is nearing the end of July… and as you can see, the mural is almost
finished. The date of the completed
mural is September 13th. There’s
a very simple reason for this large gap in time… it was summer! I was very busy
in our gardens… bike rides… camping… all sorts of summer activities!
Now… where the heck did I get the title for this
mural???
As this art was nearing its completion, I noticed
something cool! I thought that Jupiter
and Saturn… the two largest planets… looked like a body of a creature. The tips of the arcs being the feet. Mercury,
Venus, Earth and Mars then looked like the tail of the creature. Uranus became
the neck and Nepture became the head. Pluto… being a bit off centre when
compared to Nepture looked like a quirky mouth! Yup… the plant of planets
looked like a scorpion!!
Interesting… Joanne is a Scorpio! Since all these planets are in our ‘skies’…
Scorpion Skies was born as the title! I
told Jo’ that I hope she wasn’t disappointed… “After all… you got a whole house
for your birthday, last year, and this year all you get is this wall mural.” We broke out laughing… Jo’ gave me a hug and
told me that she thought it was my most beautiful painting ever… to date that
is! Haha!
Since then, this mural has been the backdrop for many of photograph…
… including this one, from 2014 when I ran for Mayor
of London!!!! AND… I’m sure it will
continue to be the backdrop for many future photos as we continue to live our
lives looking for new ways to change our society to become a sustainable one!
Yup… we have a lot of work to do! Let’s get busy…
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