To close the year up my favorite project I have worked on this year: a wood burning on my new hurdy gurdy, hopefully I will have lots of time in the new year practice playing it
With drone and melody, the consort of the Emerald King provides the proper atmosphere for those gathered for the Festival of the Final Harvest.
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Inspired by pumpkin patches, by the wind rattling dry cornstalks, and by music that demands a dance around a bonfire.
Painted in watercolor, and gouache on 140lb Arches hot press paper. Accented with metal leaf, and framed in a wooden frame painted to match.
This piece will be on display at my IlluXcon Evening Showcase table 10/20-10/21!
Painted for Every Day Original (and sold). If you'd like to know as soon as my Every Day Original pieces go up, join the newsletter here.
I picked Angharad. She just didn't deserve to die after all that fight, and I know she'd made plans for the future that would have changed the world.
Every time I watch MMFR, I hold my breath a little bit hoping Angaharad will survive just this once. Obviously, it's silly. I love how many people recognize her in this poll! @evilasiangenius says, "the leader of the revolution should have had the chance to build that new world that was only dream of" and it felt so good to see those words. It's so great to see Angharad recognized so fully. I think a casual viewer *could* see Furiosa as the leader, but she wasn't. She was the vehicle, The War Rig personified.
And in the end, that's actually why I think, narratively, that she's perhaps one of the most important people to die. The rest of my revolutionaries - at the very least Capable and Cheedo - I felt were on this ride holding onto Angharad's coat tails. Even Furiosa was until that point in it out of a sense of vengeance, not community or revolution.
Angharad's passing forces them all to find their own reasons for what they were doing. I think it also forces them to see the courage it takes in reaching for a new world, one that isn't just like the last but under a new leader.
Could these things have all happened if she lives? Absolutely! But it makes space for it to happen in the few hours we get in the movie. Between that and the added commentary the movie is making about sexual violence, it's the one death that I don't think could have been substituted for anyone else barring Nux. What it does to the narrative is so beautiful.
AND YET!!
I wish she could have lived.
I wish she could have seen Dag adopt so fully into the Vulvalini's culture.
I wish she could have seen Furiosa's desperation to save Toast.
I wish she could have seen Capable lead, to know what it is to find a mind in pain and hold out hope and see it light someone up from the inside.
I wish she could have seen Cheedo's bravery, in pretending to go back only to hold out a hand to the woman who's hellbent on changing her world, all so they could make a new one.
I wish she could have seen The Mother's, unprompted, out of a need to stop suffering, open the floodgates and sustain The Wretched.
I wish I could have seen her reaching into the crowds as they rose up to the Citadel and pulled up the hurt and lost and desperate with the promise of food and shelter and water.
If anyone deserved that, it was Angharad. And oh, how it hurts that she died before she could see all of what her spark ignited.
niche take this will reach no one void hear my scream
the french name of the hurdy gurdy is dumb and i hate it. "vielle à roue" you dumb fuck. no folklore. no whimsy. litteraly just means 'string instrument with a wheel'. should've been called "ourdi gourdi". that rocks. other than sounding way more fun, parts of it sound like other words that have somewhat related meaning but also somehow zero etymological relationship ('hurdy gurdy' apparently originating from imitation of the instrument's sound)
"ourdir" means to prepare carefuly, often said about political plots or sometimes, cloth or strings; "être dégourdi" means to be resourceful, to know how to use one's skills and knowledge, and "gourde" originally describes a gourd, squash or calabash shaped container
you could then invent a false etymology combining these three words mixed together, saying that it comes from jesters and court musicians, often somewhat involved in court drama and described as sly, smart and skillfull in popular tales, and the gourd shaped instrument they would often play at receptions. of course it's wrong - it's nowhere close to the actual etymology, and the hurdy gurdy, which only relatively recently became more compact and stopped being a two-men's job, was really more a church instrument, while the court enternainers' iconic instrument is the lute, or other guitar-adjacent instruments like the mandolin
but it's just so much more fun. it feels right. it feels interesting and insightful. it for sure is not. but the simple thought exercise of making all this up made me really happy actually this is so fun
Wanted to post a reel to insta, and while trying to decide on an audio, I remembered "wait, I own an instrument" So 15th century dance of death on hurdy gurdy it is!
Pre-orders for this tapestry design close on the 11th of November!! Pre-order form can be found here: https://forms.gle/ZKuDZF62Rx2ibwD18