Decay

Enough! Enough! I am afraid that the ugly truth is only too obvious under my cheerful lines - a picture of decay in art, also of decay in artists.

-Nietzsche

Transparent Decay

"The gathering of soft, graceful figures has at some point been pervaded by a transparent decay, and in the very air they breathe there is already the smell of death."

-Yukio Mishima

Wheels of Being

In Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims:

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of Being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of Being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of Being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, Being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

Silence

"[Heidegger] brings up the image of a sentinel at his station in the night surrounded by absolute darkness. The sentinel is tuning into the surrounding silence of beings in an attempt to catch the tiniest signs of the sound’s barely detectable emergence amidst its absence."
-Dugin

Young Shepherd

Sometimes, memories are found in the strangest places.

Here, it's as if Nature temporarily amended this Classical-style statue, adding a traditional Svan hat out of snow to the boy-shepherd, reminding me of the Caucasus and of my grandfather. 

Part-Georgian and raised on the border of the Svaneti region of that country, my grandfather was not, however, of Svan descent, an ancient mountainous people described as the best warriors of the east in Crusader literature.

But, when I was little, he often wore a felt Svan hat. The latter are made so they could also retain water, and are used as cups or a bowls by sheep herders in the mountains. My grandfather also had a number of other items that seemed otherworldly to me as a child, such as traditional drinking horns. 

And they still do, except with added nostalgia.

boy with lamb 850 px url.jpg

Melt into Thin Air

M&M (unburnt between 1928-1940):

Margarita poured Azazello some cognac, and he willingly drank it. The master, not taking his eyes off him, quietly pinched his own left hand under the table. But the pinches did not help. Azazello did not melt into air, and, to tell the truth, there was no need for that. There was nothing terrible in the short, reddish-haired man, unless it was his eye with albugo, but that occurs even without sorcery, or unless his clothes were not quite ordinary—some sort of a cassock or cloak—but again, strictly considered, that also happens. He drank his cognac adroitly, too, as all good people do, by the glassful and without nibbling. From this same cognac the master's head became giddy, and he began to think.

'No, Margarita's right...Of course, this is the Devil's messenger sitting before me.'

Eventless

I've been working very closely with a number of texts by and on Martin Heidegger for about a year. The side effect of that is, yet again, my realization that I cannot stop illustrating him, specifically the concept of the Abandonment (Seinverlassenheit) by and the Oblivion (Seinsvergessenheit) of Being.

In Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), he writes:

The abandonment by Being is cloaked in the increasing authority of calculation, speed, and the claim of the massive.

I'm also unsure as to why I don't engage in creating such photo illustrations more often. After all, I like the end result quite a bit. I suspect that it's my perfectionism: at times, adding effects to a photograph that I shot is simpler than actually setting up and shooting it. It's as if I feel that artistic pursuits must always contain excessive toil and torment, especially traditional art (e.g., drawing), and that enjoyment must come only in the end as a result of producing something worthwhile.

In a way, this is a productivist attitude that I cannot seem to shake off: I create these for myself, and I enjoy the process; therefore, this cannot happen! ;)