The many mediums of Satan

Hi y’all,

Welcome back to the blog! I know it’s been some time — sorry about that, things have been crazy. Since I last posted, I’ve been working on some new Satanic art for the Milton project, making some progress on the plein air painting, and plotting a new collaboration.

Let’s start with the new versions of Satan I’ve cooked up. I’ve turned the scene from Book I of Paradise Lost where Satan and his legions have been cast into Hell into a Procreate drawing. For a refresher, I had already worked up a conte and gouache drawing of this scene. Here’s that piece below:

Satan, fallen, stands to address his legions in Hell - conte and gouache on paper

As you can see, the first drawing was in black and white. The Procreate drawing was meant to help me think through some of the color questions I’ll be facing when I make this into an oil painting.

Satan, fallen, stands to address his legions in Hell - Procreate

Speaking of oil painting, I’ve finally finished the oil study of Satan’s head. As you can see above, my goal when painting Satan is to get as much chaos in the colors as possible in order to visually depict Satan’s inner turmoil. For the head study, I wanted to capture Satan’s descent into moral depravity, so I started with an underpainting using the Zorn palette, which only has a couple of colors. As I began working in the thick, impasto, chaotic blends of warms and cools, I ran into a problem — as I added more warm, it canceled out the cools, and vice versa, plus I was having trouble controlling my values (lights and darks). Here’s where the painting was when I last posted it:

Satan’s head (WIP) - oil study

Nothing a trip to the Met won’t fix! I decided to go poke around the impressionists, post-impressionists, and pointillists, and, sure enough, I found the fix. The key, as usual, lay in massing — creating large masses of light and dark, warm and cool, before adding smaller variations within them. If you look at this Renoir, for instance, the values and colors look blocked in in large shapes from a distance:

Renoir piece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

But if you get closer, you can see smaller variations in color and value inside the masses:

Renoir, detail

The same is true for this pointillist piece (I failed to take down the artist’s name, unfortunately):

Pointillist piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pointillist piece, detail

Pointillist piece, detail

With that in mind, I came back to the Satan head study. Focusing on massing first, I was able to work in more color chaos without messing up the values. That, plus a little stand oil, and voila, Satan:

Satan’s head - oil study

My take is a lot more painterly and saturated than the Renoir or the pointillist piece (what can I say, I like big brushes and loud colors), but, if you look closely, you can see the same mass-first-vary-later principle at work:

Satan head, oil study - detail

In some less unsettling painting news, I’ve also been making some progress on the plein air WIP I posted last time:

Inwood Hill Park, oil on canvas (WIP)

Between the tropical storms, flash floods, and heat waves, the weather has been keeping me painting indoors lately, but hopefully I’ll be able to get back out there and make some more progress on this soon.

In other news, I’ve got another collaboration coming up with my friend Kevin Shoemaker, a.k.a. Dandelot. For anyone who doesn’t know, Kevin is a really talented musician and producer. Kevin and I hung out in virtual reality a few weeks ago to do some live painting and playing/producing. If you missed it, check out the video below:

Kevin is releasing his debut album at the end of the summer. As part of the album release, I’m going to make a piece of visual art for every song, which I’m really excited about! You can keep up with the project and Kevin’s album release by stopping by his website and signing up for updates.

That’s it for this week! Check back in for more updates soon. Til then, have a great week, and keep creating!

Satan! + some non-Miltonic art

Hi y’all,

Welcome back to the blog! This week, I’ve got some new work on the Milton angels project, some plein air painting, and an update on collaborations. On the Milton side of things, I’m excited to share that I finally got through a finished drawing of a full-body (fallen) angel, head and all! Of course, I started with the best character in Paradise Lost: Satan.

Satan addresses the fallen legions in Hell, Paradise Lost, Book I — conte and gouache on paper

This drawing started off as an attempt to fix the problems of the last full body angel I completed. That study, done in pen and ink on much smaller paper, came out a little awkward and too obviously stitched together for my taste. Here’s a reminder of what that looked like:

The first attempt at stringing together a full-body angel — pen and ink on paper

On the first angel, I worked from the previous anatomy studies I’ve completed for the Milton angels project, but I didn’t have any overall guide to reference (other than some gestural lines I made up at random). The result was an unfortunately clunky figure, a bit cartoonish and awkward. I’m much happier with the second one. For that drawing, I combined a finished figure drawing I did at The Art Students League with my angel anatomy studies. Here’s the finished drawing I was using as a reference:

Line/Tone/Value No. 7 — Conte, pen and ink, and gouache on paper

The latest study started as an attempt to improve upon the shortcomings of the first full body angel, but, as I worked, it developed a life of its own. The staff of the figure reminded me of Satan’s spear from the beginning of Paradise Lost. The distorted head looked like a fallen angel.

So I decided to turn it into a scene near the beginning of the epic. Here, Satan and his legions have been cast out of Heaven, fallen through Chaos, and landed in Hell. Milton describes Hell as a “dungeon horrible” around which “one great furnace flamed”. However, Hell’s flames cast “[n]o light, but rather darkness visible”. To capture that, I kept some light on the top of the figure, but kept the flames on which Satan stands dark.

Milton also describes Satan as carrying a “ponderous shield” and a massive spear from the battle in Heaven. The shield is “massy, large, and round” and “[hangs] on his shoulders like the moon”, while the spear is the size of “the tallest pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills”. I had a lot of fun playing with the scale of the imagery there.

For painting these past two weeks, I took a break from Milton-related work to do some plein air. The plein air painting is still in progress, but it’s been so nice to get outside and paint when the weather’s nice. Check out the WIP below:

Inwood Hill Park, oil on canvas (WIP)

More updates there soon. And don’t forget you can get behind-the-scenes time lapse videos and process photos of this painting, the Milton illustrations, and whatever else I’m working on by subscribing to my Patreon!

I also got to spend a night painting and chatting with the very talented Kevin Shoemaker while he produced music for us in virtual reality. It was a strange and fun experience, one very apt for the (hopefully?) tail end of COVID. Check out the video of our collaboration below:

And here’s the finished version of the painting I made to Kevin’s music:

Collaborative painting with Kevin Shoemaker, oil on canvas

You can find the rest of Kevin’s virtual reality hangs, as well as some great singles from his upcoming album, on his YouTube channel. And don’t forget to stop by his website, too.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for stopping by. Have a great week and keep creating!

Frankensteining angels, NFT updates, collaborations

Hey y’all,

Welcome back to the blog! Pardon the interruption between this post and the last — I’ve been traveling and life has gotten a little hectic in the interim. In today’s post, I’ve got some updates on the NFT hustle and some recent/upcoming collaborations, as well as more work on the Milton project.

In the land of NFTs, I’ve got good news and bad. The bad news is that my first NFT didn’t sell within the auction timeframe. Alas. Gas (the cost of conducting transactions on the blockchain) was very high for Ethereum, the cryptocurrency I was using to sell my NFT, so I’m hoping that’s at least partly to blame.

Satan’s head, Procreate… slightly modified. Perhaps a new NFT?

The good news is that I haven’t let that get me down! Huzzah! Gas has dropped substantially, so I’ve re-listed the Satan head study and listed a new one: the angel torso study. I’m selling the angel torso as a bundle, meaning that it’s two NFTs grouped together. The bundle includes the time lapse process video and the finished piece. You can find the bundle here and the re-listed Satan head here (sans frown and text, sadly).

Part of a lovely NFT package now available on OpenSea

And just a reminder that you can get prints of the angel torso on my Etsy! You can also sign up to receive monthly prints on Patreon (plus some other goodies and access to behind the scenes visuals). As always, you can find the full range of products and services I’m offering on the Shop & Learn page.

I’ve also been hacking away at more studies for the Milton project. I’m (slowly) working up an oil version of the Satan head study. With this one, I want capture Satan’s descent into depravity, so I started with an underpainting using the Zorn palette (a very limited palette invented by the great Anders Zorn). On top it, I’ve been getting wilder and weirder with the colors and textures.

Satan’s head, front view, oil on canvas (WIP)

The goal is for the distortions to get more severe as you go down the figure in terms of anatomy, color, brushwork, perspective, etc. It’s still pretty rough, and it’s definitely been a learning curve for me to figure out how to balance these two types of painting, but I like where it’s going so far. At the very least, I’m sure this study will teach me a great deal.

I’ve also gotten through my first full body pen and ink study of the angels that includes a head:

Full body angel study, front view, pen and ink

Like the back view study, I stitched this together using the various anatomy studies I’ve completed thus far. Here’s the back view for comparison:

The front view study is certainly weird enough for me, and there’s parts that I think came out well. Still, it looks a little too obviously Frankenstein’d for me. To fix that, I’m going to try working from figure studies I’ve drawn from life previously (or make new ones), and distort from there. To start, I think I’m going to try working from one of the last line/tone/value experiments I completed at The Art Students League of New York:

Line/Tone/Value, No. 7; mixed media on paper

More on that next time! In other news, I had a great time contributing poetry to Mei Yamanaka’s “Naked Tree” dance/video project. For the project, Mei worked with 15 different sound artists to create different versions of the same video. It was really cool to see how they all turned out! Everyone contributed amazing work, and the energy really shifted depending on the collaborators. The video I worked on with Mei is below; you can find the others on her YouTube channel.

Lastly, I’ve got another exciting collaboration coming up tomorrow night with musician and producer Kevin Shoemaker, a.k.a. Dandelot. Kevin is a seriously talented guy — if you haven’t checked out the tracks he’s released from his upcoming album, don’t sleep. You can find them on his YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages. Check out his website, too, for videos, VR, and other cool content. One of my favorite tracks from the album is below:

Kevin and I will be meeting tomorrow, June 2, around 8:30PM EST in virtual reality to livestream a joint session of live playing/producing and live painting. You can tune into it on his YouTube channel. Stop by and say hi!

That’s it for now. Have a great week and keep creating!

Satan's head, Patreon, NFTs, and more!

Hi everyone, welcome back to the blog! This week, I’ve got some exciting announcements and some more work on the Milton project. First, I’m happy to announce that I’m now on Patreon! You can support at a variety of levels to get access to exclusive process photos and time-lapse videos, sneak peaks of upcoming performances, lessons and critiques, and all kinds of visual art products. Check it out, and thanks in advance to any and all supporters!

As usual, you can also find the full range of products and services I’m offering on the Shop & Learn section of the website. As of now, I’m selling originals and prints and offering private lessons, in addition to the goodies available on Patreon. I’ll be selling NFTs soon, too — more on that at the end of this post.

I’m also excited to share that I’m taking part in dancer Mei Yamanaka’s upcoming video project, “Naked Tree.” Mei’s collaborating with 15 different sound artists for the project, and I’m so happy to be one of them! I’ll be doing a short intro to our collaboration on May 9, so stay tuned for updates there! You can also get a sneak peak of the video on Patreon.

From Mei Yamanaka’s upcoming video project, “Naked Tree”

I’ve also got some exciting updates on the Milton project. I’ve been thinking more about illustrating angels, fallen and unfallen alike, from the front, as I’ve mostly been focusing on the back view til now. First up: wings.

Blue heron wings (above), angel wings with torso (below), front view, pen and ink

As with the back view, I started off by doing a study of blue heron wings, then distorted them and added the torso for the angelic version. I’ve included the back view below for comparison:

Blue heron wings (above), angel wings with torso (below), front view, pen and ink

I also worked up a Procreate study of Satan’s head. As I shared in my last post, I think the distorted anatomy study I drew is a little too alien to be anything but a very fallen Satan. Here’s a refresher of what that looked like:

Distorted anatomy study, muscles of the head and neck, pen and ink

Since I’m thinking of this as Satan at his most fallen, I got pretty wild with the colors and textures on Procreate. I also played around a lot more with layers this time, so be warned: the process video is kind of a light show.

Satan’s head, front view, Procreate

I’m happy to share that I’m turning this study into my first NFT! For anyone who isn’t familiar with NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, they’re essentially a way to create a one-of-a-kind digital copy of a piece of artwork that can be bought and sold with cryptocurrency. It’s a rapidly developing market, and I’m excited to dive into it! You can find the Satan head NFT by clicking here. Bidding starts Thursday at 5PM EST — hope you stop by and check it out!

That’s it for this week. Thanks for tuning in! Have a great week and keep creating.

Limbs, wings, and lessons, oh my

Hi y’all,

Welcome back to the blog and another installment of my Wizard of Oz puns (I feel I owe it to my home state). This week, I’m happy to announce that I’m now offering private lessons in drawing, painting, and creative writing via nailit! You can sign up for them here. To see the full range of lessons and products I’m offering, you can also go the “Shop & Learn” section of my website (more there coming soon). Always feel free to shoot me an email at slreichmanart@gmail.com, too, to inquire about purchasing originals or commissioning a piece.

Enough of the sales pitch, though — let’s get nerdy! In last week’s post, I was exploring how to visually represent Milton’s ideas about good and evil. For anyone who hasn’t read that post, I think it comes down to organization. The more organized, the more sin-free, the more chaotic, the more evil.

I decided to go with a good angel for the angel arm study I was working on last week. Here’s where it ended up:

Angel arm, side view, oil study (finished)

With this study, I think I’ve started to learn how to distinguish the fallen and unfallen angels using color, texture, and brushwork. However, as I shared last week, I think this study veered a little too far from human anatomy to really read as an arm. For anyone who doesn’t remember what the piece looked like last week, here it is again:

Angel arm, side view, oil study (WIP; finished study above)

Even with the rest of the fingers there now and the rendering complete, it still feels a little too alien to me, largely because of the proportions. With that in mind, I’ve been trying to keep the next study a little closer to human. I’ve gotten wilder and weirder with the color, brushwork, and texture (this one’s a fallen angel), but I’ve tried to keep the forms and proportions a little closer to actual human anatomy.

Angel leg, back view, oil study (WIP)

More on that study soon! And tune in to Instagram Live tonight (Thursday, March 4, for those reading later) at 6PM EST for some live action on this piece.

I’ve also been prepping for an oil study of angel wings, which I’ll probably get started on next week. I started off with a pen and ink study of blue heron wings for a reference point, then distorted them and stuck them on a back view of an angel torso. Voila, angel wings:

Blue heron wing study (above), angel wing study (below), back view, pen and ink

To get a better sense of what I might do with the wings in terms of color and brushwork, I also got a Procreate study together. You can find it below:

Angel wing study, back view, Procreate

That’s it for this week! Thanks so much for reading. Have a great week and keep creating!

Contemplating Satan

Hi y’all,

Welcome to this week’s blog post! Today, I want to share my thoughts on (eventually) illustrating one of Paradise Lost’s most interesting characters: Satan.

What fascinates me about Milton’s version of Satan is how likable (and, at times, relatable) Milton makes him out to be. Before his fall from Heaven, Satan (then Lucifer, meaning “light bringer”) is the most beautiful, radiant, and eloquent angel. These same traits play a big role in his fall. He’s able to persuade other angels to join his rebellion because his eloquence makes him persuasive. His radiance and beauty lead to a very weird, incestuous affair with Sin, who springs out of his head as a fully formed goddess (for my fellow classical nerds, yes, that’s an Athena-Zeus reference).

In the end, though, it’s Satan’s pride that leads to his downfall. When he first arrives to Eden to tempt Adam and Eve, Satan has a prolonged moment of doubt. It’s my favorite monologue in the poem (beginning of the fourth book, for anyone who’s interested in reading the full thing). He confesses to the reader that “pride and ambition threw [him] down” and wishes that he had been “some inferior angel”, so that he could have “stood happy”. The problem, however, cuts deeper: “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; / And in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide, / To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”

Satan’s inner torment distorts his outward appearance. As he goes through waves of rage, doubt, and despair, they “[mar] his borrowed visage”. After the fall of Adam and Eve (spoiler alert), God even turns Satan and his fellow angels-turned-demons into snakes.

I want my depiction of Satan to capture both his luminosity before the fall and his gradual distortion through pride, rage, and sadness. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

Satan torso, back view, oil study (WIP)

I’m still tinkering with it, but I like the direction so far. After the last oil study (which you can find below), I wanted to get more experimental with the brushwork, color, and texture — basically, to get more energy in the piece, spice it up a bit. As I painted, I thought more and more about Satan’s dual nature, and, eventually, the two ideas merged into one.

Angel torso, front view, oil study

Prepping for the Satanic torso involved a lot of pen and ink studies, most of which I put up in last week’s post. For comparison’s sake, I’ve included them below, along with one more I worked through before starting the oil study.

Angel torso, back view (1)

Angel torso, back view (2)

And, as always, I started with a human anatomy study, which you can find below:

Human torso, back view

That’s it for this week! I’ll be back next week with an update on the WIP oil study, some more pen and inks, and whatever other art news I have to share. Thanks for tuning in and have a great week!

More angels; send us your Iliad poems!

Hi y’all,

Welcome back to the blog! This week, I’ve got an update on the Milton illustration project and a high-key pitch for you to submit your best Iliad-related poems to Consequence, where I work as the assistant poetry editor.

For those of you who haven’t read last week’s post, I’ve recently started work on a long-time goal: illustrating the angels from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. If you’re not familiar with the poem, it’s essentially a retelling of Genesis/the fall of Adam and Eve (but much more exciting and stuffed with drama). At one point, Milton describes the angels’ anatomy as “vital in every part”, capable of taking on whatever shape they please, and similar to the “fluid air" (check out last week’s post for the full passage).

Over the past week, I’ve gotten through two more pen and ink studies of the angel anatomy, this time of the back view of their torso. As usual, I started with a regular, human anatomy study:

Human torso, back view

then distorted it:

Angel torso, back view

I’ve also worked up a procreate study of the back view of the angel torso, like I did for the front view. I decided to get a little more adventurous with the lighting and mark-making here. While it was more difficult than the last Procreate study, I think I also learned more along the way.

Angel torso, back view (Procreate)

I also managed to get through the first study using oils. As I was working on it, I kept thinking about how the medium naturally translates Milton’s idea of the angels’ bodies being like the “fluid air.” In future oil studies, though, I think I want to get more out-there with the color choices and the background. Live and learn!

That’s it for this week on the Milton project. Outside of that, I’m very excited to announce that we have an open reading period through the end of March at Consequence. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the journal, we’re dedicated to art and writing on the culture and consequences of war. This coming issue, we’re launching a special project — “What is War Poetry?” — in which we’ll be asking fundamental questions about the historical development and importance of war poetry. For the first installment, we’ll be tackling those questions through the lens of the Iliad, the ancient Greek epic composed by Homer about the Trojan War/the beef between Achilles and Agamemnon. Send us your best poems that touch on the Iliad here! And stay tuned for future special issues. Next up: the Bhagavad Gita.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for tuning in and keep creating!

Welcome! (with angels)

Hi y’all,

Welcome to the blog! In an effort to be more transparent about my process, I’ll be posting here once a week or so. Stay tuned to keep up with current artistic projects — painting, poetry, and bears, oh my.

To get started, I want to share some studies for a project I’m excited about, although it’s still in early stages: a series of illustrations for Milton’s angels from Paradise Lost. For anyone who doesn’t know, Paradise Lost is a book-length poem that John Milton wrote in the 17th century. It retells the story of the fall of Adam and Eve. The poem starts with Satan’s fall from Heaven and ends (spoiler alert) with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

It’s truly a great poem — a lot of work, to be sure, but one of my all-time favorites. Milton earns his place in my top five with this poem for the sentences and rhythm alone. If that’s not enough for you, it’s got torture (literally), heartbreak (figuratively), and adventure (both).

I first tried to read it a few years ago in Delhi, but ended up giving the book away to a friend. I tried again with a reading group the next year in New York, but we trailed off. Finally, two years ago, during my MFA, I managed to get through it. Third time’s the charm.

I was also studying artistic anatomy, drawing, and painting at The Art Students League of New York at the time. One passage in particular fascinated me:

”[…] for spirits that live throughout
Vital in every part, not as frail man
In entrails, heart or head, liver or reins,
Cannot but by annihilation die;
Nor in their liquid texture mortal wound
Receive, no more than can the fluid air:
All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
All intellect, all sense, and as they please,
They limb themselves, and color, shape or size
Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.”

The passage comes from book six. Raphael, one of the archangels, is telling Adam about the battle in Heaven between the pro-God forces and Satan + his soon-to-be-fallen angels. Essentially, it’s pointless — since they’re all celestial beings, none of the angels can seriously wound each other. Here, Raphael is explaining how their angelic anatomy allows them to quickly recover from their wounds. If you’re curious how the battle ends (spoiler alert, again), the Son drives Satan and his companions out of Heaven on a fiery chariot. They plummet through Chaos into Hell. It’s pretty great.

This passage has been tickling my art-nerd brain ever since I read it — what would muscles, fibers, and bones that form as freely as the “fluid air” look like? For every little part of a body to be independently and fully alive? And part of a single being?

Well, here’s my best guess:

For now, I’m working through these studies one section of the body at a time. The first is an angel torso, the second angel legs. Both are pen and ink (microns, to be exact). I’ve been starting with studies of regular human anatomy, then distorting them to fit Milton’s description. Here are the corresponding regular human studies:

I’ve also worked up an angel torso on Procreate. The idea was to think through how these studies might eventually work as paintings (color, brushwork, etc.).

I’ll be doing more studies in the coming weeks with pen and ink, Procreate, and, eventually, real-life oils. Stay tuned here and on Instagram to see more. Thanks so much for reading! Keep creating and have a great week.