Sunday, April 14, 2013

Another Mothman

This one's a painting—well, a photo of a painting—created and shared with me by EDILW reader and frequent commenter, David Rhay Patty.

His Mothman certainly fits the witness descriptions of the creature, and has has a ghost-like, not-quite-there quality to it. In this image, Mothman seems to be abandoning the carcass of a dog as a car approaches, sort of filling in the blanks between a couple of sightings (The farmer whose German shepherd Bandit disappeared after it chased a pair of big, red, reflector-like eyes into a field, the dead dog on the side of the road that the couples in the first publicized Mothman sighting saw as they sped into town to seek the police).

Here's a sketch Patty did while preparing for the painting:
Obviously the sketch is much more abstracted, but I like the cloud-like quality of this one, with the specks of black informing the shape, as if Mothman is a composite entity formed by a swarm of regular-sized moths.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was considering doing the final painted MM in the pointillist style of the sketch, but as time went on and layer after layer went on, MM became the only layer where you could see the original paper... in addition to the wood grain it's glued to. The contrast in textures was too good to pass up so I just kept rubbing color pencil & grapite into MM's patch as the painting progressed & tried to keep borders as ephemeral as possible.

Thanks for the kind words, Caleb.