Cura + Anima
Updated: May 5, 2019
= CURA ANIMARUM
I have promised a blog entry about the thoughts behind "CURA, Story of a Whale", so I will try to remember a few things, now that the second drawing is finished. I am in the mood for writing right now, I might even make sense. If you would like to remain with your own ideas about the drawings, please don´t read further.
"CURA" is the first drawing and "ANIMA" is the second. Together they form a complete story and their official shared title is "CURA ANIMARUM", to get it right in latin. It should mean "Curing of the Soul" and comes from the Christian Church as far as I know. I took this title because I think it fits my two drawings as well, since the whale represents a soul, a transformation, a safe place and many more beautiful things.
So I researched on whales as animals, I looked up their symbolic meaning, I stumbled upon a very interesting system on the internet, read that and than went on reading a bit of Jung and Pinocchio. Whales are officially not fish and Pinocchio would look bad as driftwood. Never mind, he survived.
Both drawings are separated into two halves. The top half of CURA is where the story begins. The top half of ANIMA is where it ends. The whale can be seen as a being undergoing self-discovery. From the dark space it jumps into unknown waters in the lower half of CURA, where the Soulies sleep and than undergoes a process of learning until it reaches again the stars with new self-awareness in the top half of ANIMA, bringing with it the awakened Soulies.
Like this it becomes a close circle that we need to repeat a lot (and lot and ...) of times in our existence. We don´t know something, we learn, we become more knowledgeable. (...)
The romantic story is the one written in CURA´s description. The whale is a soul traveling from star to star, getting to know different places and people, making and containing connections in form of those golden lines I drew. He brings new knowledge to those "asleep" for that knowledge and connects them with all the places he has seen before them. It´s like drawing lines between stars in the universe, making it a web of communication, friendship and transforming it from what seems a very lonely and empty space, into a multicultural map for explorers of all kinds. Can you imagine how awesome that would be? Travelling to a distant planet with differently shaped and coloured beings there and even take pictures with new found friends, eating literally out of this World food?! I am super excited right now, but you cannot see me. I also watch too many movies. An intergalactic Instagram! Huh...
Back to the story. So far I think I could say it´s a mix of religion, psychology and sci-fi. There is a black, white and gold mix of colours. If you put the two drawings together, you get a "YIN and YANG" situation. The head is a labyrinth with knowledge shining like stars for everyone to see. And the whale has little stars between his "teeth"! I though it cool to look like a giant vacuum cleaner rushing through space, eating up experiences and stardust. What else......CURA equals REGRESSION, ANIMA equals ASCENSION. It´s about finding out you´ve got a "self", than diving into that unknown under the iceberg and than after embracing all of that, coming out of the water with the knowledge of the whole self, let´s say he´s enlightened. Of course you might take more than that one dive, but experiences should not only connect us to ourselves, but to others as well.
Now for how it was drawn: I drew two almost exact drawings. Because one took quite long, I needed a break before I could get myself to draw the other one. Black and white are switched, the gold remains the same. Soulies are repositioned and changed for their new activities. Otherwise there is not a lot of differences. Everything is drawn with isograph pens again, the black is a shellack based acrylic ink from Sennelier, the gold is from Liquitex and Daller & Rowney. The gold pigmented ink was a bit tricky because the squares are very small, also I wanted it to really shine, so two to three layers were needed and some correction afterwards. I am very satisfied with the result now, the colour change with sunlight is very nice. A few examples below:
(CLICK TO ENLARGE THE PICTURE:)
So, I guess you could analyse this as everything else, but I think I got most of it down. I know what I thought and felt to make me draw this, but you should see, think, feel for yourself. Like everything.
If you have any questions, please feel free to write me an email at info@draw-ink.com and I will try to make more sense or we shall try it together.
:)
PK