12″x14″, Paper, Graphite and Charcoal
This drawing of the rustic castle, surrounded by rocks, and floating on an uprooted island, is my visual interpretation of a quote from J.R.R Tolkien!s Mythopoeia. It says, “I will not walk with your progressive apes, erect and sapient, before them gapes the dark abyss to which their progress tends.” Tolkien believed heavily in foreknowledge: the idea that, all things that humans come to know, realize, or imagine, are all memories that have been stored in the back of their minds and that are being unlocked; In other words, all the knowledge that people gain is knowledge that they already possess. He used this ideology to fortify his belief in the mythological world. If all knowledge contained by humans are memories, then the creatures that people deem as being “mythical” must have existed at some point in time otherwise, we would have no recollection of their appearance or behavior. Tolkien!s conflict in the poem was that once people become too fixated on the progression of man, science, and the material world, they lose sight of the past and the truth of the past that myths contain within them. Once this happens, the past crumbles and they lose sight of the future. The castle upon the floating island represents the fantasy world in Tolkien’s poem, and the black shading surrounding the floating island is representative of the dark abyss to which the progress of mankind is headed. The idea is that once you refuse to believe that myths contain truth within them, then you are subject to slip off the edge of the rock and into the dark abyss of nothingness—a place where there is no future because a future cannot exist without the past behind it. The castle and the rock were drawn with graphite pencils, a blending cloth, and an eraser pencil, and the background of the illustration was drawn with pure charcoal and a blending cloth. An artist who inspires me is Feliks Kaparachuk.