Flying White (Praying Velociraptor + Heart Container)

🦖 20"x30" - acrylic paint pens on gallery-wrapped canvas.

🦖 Started while painting The Santa Fe Brewing Company for Papadosio, Dirtwire, and Cloudchord, then carried to Denver to live paint at the Psychedelic Science Conference as part of Tribe 13 Gallery, and then completed in the New Mexico desert to an evening of diverse and magical vinyl listening. See the entire biography of this painting as a photo album!

🦖 Named after the style of Buddhist calligraphy in which the calligrapher uses a relatively dry brush fast enough to leave swaths of empty space in each stroke — a testament to incompleteness, emptiness, and gesture. According to Beyond-Calligraphy.com, flying white is "Light, poetic in its mobility, graceful, and delicate. It is quite often combined with paintings interwoven into the text, such as dragons, birds, or other motifs." Similarly, this painting is a tribute to the nonduality of endings and beginnings, the secular and the sacred, science and magic, knowledge and mystery, the past and future...and maybe just maybe a window into one of my past lives. And obviously about my mundane past life as a scientific illustrator and paleontologist, and lifelong love of dinosaurs, dragons, feathered serpents, and associated beasts.

In fact, while working on this piece in Denver, I was sucked into a powerful discussion with a woman who had lost her house to fire and talked with her for hours about how sometimes you can't tell if you are flying or falling, dying or being born. She pulled a white jade phoenix/dragon amulet out of her pocket unaware of how those two beasts came to represent me and my wife at a time when I had to tell myself that the eternal does not differentiate between one's spouse and nemesis and I had already painted this...Homes and Moriarty are forever joined, just like The Lovers of Valdaro or "the fighting dinosaurs" Velociraptor and Protoceratops, buried together  in a sandstorm. Have I really seen my own death, or have I just seen some other distant ancient death (or deaths) I can't help but re-live and concretize the shape of myth as a prediction, an accident that prophets love to make?

🦖 Dedicated to Sudhar Sonar Astor, to whose fulfillment and release I am devoted.

🦖 Posters: Signed print on 11"x17" glossy 100 lb. cardstock, shipped in a plastic bag with cardboard backing.  Signed giclee canvas prints and original painting both available!