Research

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, John Martin, 1852. 

When I start a project I like to create a pinboard on pinterest and gather together research constantly and actively. Sometimes I like to sit in bed and find research images.


When I first made my afterlife pinboard for this project the very first thing I added was 'The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah' By John Martin. I have seen this painting in person and it brought out very strong feelings in me. To start with, the painting is over a metre and a half wide meaning that the scale sucks you in and takes up your vision. The blurry swooshing fire casts down from the engulfing violet clouds. And from these clouds strikes a bold glowing lightening bolt. This is an image of gods fury and vengeance. An image of a fire and brimstone old testament god. An image of hell on earth .
This is what happens to sinners, folks!

I want to add something to this image. I'm just not sure what to add yet.

Last week when I was paper Marbling, I decided to try and emulate the colour and feeling of inferno in John Martin's painting:

I looked at other traditional Christian paintings such as 'An Angel Frees the Souls of Purgatory' by Lodovico Carracci (1610):

This depicts heaven, hell and the in-between. 

Angels feature in art of the afterlife quite a lot. I especially like Gustav Dore's etchings of angels for Dante's Divine Comedy. I was shown these by one of our teachers, Chris.

'The hosts of heaven' (1868) 

Lucifer falling from heaven. 

As I said above, these images are inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, an epic poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed 1320.
I will talk about this more in another blog post.

Other religious art I have looked at includes depictions of Ragnarok- the old norse doomsday where the gods and half of the dead warriors, lead by Odin, face off against the forces of evil. It is foretold that Surtr will engulf the earth in flame leaving no life except for one man and one woman.

'Battle of the Doomed Gods' -Friedrich Wilhelm Heine (1882) 

The couple left to repopulate the world is Líf- the feminine name for life and Lífþrasir- masculine, translating to 'lover of life'. I love how this ties together Christian ideas of doomsday and Adam and Eve; the Stories of the end and the beginning of the world. This alludes to a cycle that goes on forever.

The last bit of research that I'm going to stick on this blogpost is Buddhist. Mandalas are very popular in Buddhism, monks will spend days pouring out coloured sand into huge intricate patterns that represent concepts such as night, day, life, death as well as the three realms of afterlife they believe in.

'Thangka' aka the wheel of life.
The central 3 animals represent Greed (pig), Hatred (snake) and Lust (cock).I think that Buddhists are very cool and appreciate their use of bright colour and radial-based art. I once read all about their ideas of extra planes that one could ascend to after life but it is too much to write down here right now. I might look it up again and see if it could inspire my work.


I lied, I'm going to throw one more image in that I've been researching; Baphomet, the Sabbatic goat;

By Yuri Leitch. Original icon by Eliphas Levi.

Baphomet represents man, woman, good, evil, life and death. Baphomet represents the sum total of everything. It was an idol supposedly worshipped by the Knights Templar but since then it has been used by occultists such as Szandor LaVey, the infamous author of the satanic bible.



Once again, I don't really have enough time to go into the details of these books (it's 1am and I have college tomorrow!) but you can read about them here and here. The satanic bible is 'composed of four books: The Book of Satan, The Book of Lucifer, The Book of Belial, and The Book of Leviathan. The Book of Satan challenges the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, and promotes hedonism. The Book of Lucifer holds most of the philosophy in The Satanic Bible, with twelve chapters discussing topics such as indulgence, love, hate, and sex. LaVey also uses the book to dispel rumours surrounding the religion. In The Book of Belial, LaVey details rituals and magic. He discusses the required mindset and focus for performing a ritual, and provides instructions for three rituals: those for sex, compassion, or destruction. The Book of Leviathan provides four invocations for Satan, lust, compassion, and destruction.' -Wikipedia page for The Satanic Bible

Well that's it for now! I'm not sure which bits of this research I'm going to develop yet so I decided to put it all up here to start with and to get my thoughts going.
Right, I'm off to bed.