Last week I had my grand reveal of painting no. 7 — a pictorial process that you can view here: The Resurrection of Muse — Rock Art Painting no. 7 Photographs — in this most tantalizing Rock Art Series (painting to my favourite rock musicians of all time!).

What’s This All About Again?

A quick recap about what this Rock Art Series is: I approach the canvas with no expectation of what’s about to come out. I paint subliminally to their music and experience a plethora of emotions and feelings related to the songs and possibly the quantum message behind the music/inspiration itself.

So what did I extract from the melodiously cosmic frequencies, vibrations and croonings of Muse? Before I get into that…let me whet your appetite with some of my favourite Muse songs performed live:

The Resurrection of Greatness

As I paint, certain words just pop into my head. I scribble them down on the side of the canvas. Here were the words that came up whilst painting this:

Form Structure/Restructure
Power/Control
Penance/Redemption
Longing/Sorrow
Warrior
Bondage/Bonded
Grace/Beauty
Remorse/Regret
Searching
Lost
Love

It’s quite a list! But then Muse have quite a lot of albums/songs/issues they address — so no real surprise there!

Dissecting the Painting — Piece by Piece

The top left half of the painting (as seen in the pic above) was just weird. There’s a blue insectoidal bird type-thingy (life on other planets? Panspermia perhaps?).

The background definitely felt like ‘space’ or the cosmos and I think the silver splodges of foil may have represented some kind of space-craft(s). I even marked a couple of them with the letters ‘io’ — does it mean anything? Maybe time will tell.

The green alien head was a metamorphic process. At first it was just a kind of lense flare, then I started adding a light green nebula formation and when I stepped back there was a face! It morphed out of thin air. The middle of the painting (as seen above) has clay figures emerging from a pool of blood and earth.

What looks like an alien egg with a green pregnant lady and another greenish lady’s profile. Oh lord!

There is also a skeleton alongside the biggest clay figure. I couldn’t help but think ‘clones’ when I was painting this. And as I said in the previous blog, I had no idea back then that Muse’s new album was titled ‘Drones’.

Could this section represent exogenesis (a beautiful 3 part symphony off ‘The Resistance’ album, meaning ‘outside origins’ or ‘origin from external causes’ — you can LISTEN TO THE SYMPHONY HERE)? Is it the missing link? Anyone who’s read Zecharia Sitchin will be smiling and nodding at this point. Hmmmm….

Muse 3 There is a very unusual scene happening in the bottom left-hand corner (picture on your right).

This revelation was quite something.

The fish is swimming upstream in water with what seems to be some kind of egg spawn or roe floating about.

There is a specter/ghoul/ghost/dementor type-creature emerging from the water (I can’t say I got a good feeling about this character — it seemed to be a kind of energy drainer/something to be avoided at all costs type-entity).

Then there is this beautiful woman leaning up against the buildings. She was a complete surprise.

One night, after a painting session, I took my brush (with black paint on it) and wiped it across the canvas in an attempt to clean it. When I came back to the painting the next morning, I saw her profile and arms behind her neck and just proceeding to bring the rest of her out of obscurity.

She reminds me a bit of the woman from the movie Avatar — she also looks a bit like a warrior. She is also slightly reptilian, having a fan of ‘scales’ running up her back and head — this could also be indicative of the kundalini energy.

I feel that she also represents balance — she has all the chakra points painted on the outside of her body. She gives me a feeling of temperance or self-control/self-regulation.

Then there is the mid to bottom right-hand corner (as seen in the picture to your left) where we have earth merging into metal (or perhaps the telluric/elemental realm) that drips and gives way to the material world represented by skyscrapers — our ultimate disconnection from our origins/nature/earth.

The silver paint is dripping on the face of a man (profile) who looks like he is a bit of a lost soul. Perhaps indicative of the hollow disconnection we feel in the world of steel, concrete and enslavement to the system?

In Conclusion…

This painting is like a cosmic full-circle of exo-origins mingled with earthly origins coinciding with the elements of ether, water and earth to conclude in soul versus material realm.

Shew! I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted…lol. It’s a busy work of art!

The albums I listened to whilst painting this were:

Showbiz
Origins of Symmetry
Black Holes and Revelations
Absolution
The Resistance
2nd Law

The next Rock Art painting is going to be Rufus Wainwright (read more about him here). So don’t forget to ‘follow this blog’ or subscribe (see left-hand sidebar column).