ALEMBIX
Steve Skaar
I enjoy the image of the man in the mirror, myself as wizard, but jokes like this don't do justice to the strength of the subject. These drawings and paintings are about me, of course. My odd and intense way of looking at things.
I remember my disappointment when the polymorphous perverse was explained to me--"you mean we can't do that?" Here are some explorations anyway.
The idea of the bottle is a powerful one with real meanings, including the profound ability to hold water, to include and exclude.
I remember my disappointment when the polymorphous perverse was explained to me--"you mean we can't do that?" Here are some explorations anyway.
The idea of the bottle is a powerful one with real meanings, including the profound ability to hold water, to include and exclude.
Form One
Of course I always knew the Alembix drawings were about life and death and other allusions. Dan Stevens spurred me on through his bland assertion that my drawings were first too obscure, and then metaphoric. Well, yeah.
There were a pair of seething lava lamps in the display window of the Rexall drugs in my home town, worth the two blocks extra round-trip to view. With glass, within glass, behind glass, we gain the interior view. With that, an obligation to convey....something. I always wanted that energy to emerge.
Self-diddler
Blending Column
Lava Lamp
Potence
Blending Column
Scythes slung within the column carry out a series of crude cuts, with results output in either hex or binary.
Form Two
Most people know of the Klein bottle, in which a vessel's inner surface is revealed to be the same as its outer one. Metaphorically, it's irresistable!
I achieved satori only after seven thousand seven hundred seventy-seven and seven tenths contemplations of the form.
Wait! Aren't the inside and outside of a vessel always the same?
Two-Hearted Vessel (Condensor)
Never full, never empty
Classic Klein
Impeller (3-Banger Klein)
The klein's a bight around the brain, in this case three and one-half turns around, with a delicately flared trifurcation of the intake ports. Just add fuel.
Form ThreeWells are vessels too. Suddenly water, oil. A structure built with brick partially encloses this one, perhaps a primitive blowout preventer. A pair of industrial couplings designed to divert flow. Later a series of leechlike receptacles regulate the humors of the blood.
Cistern
Cups for Bleeding
Couplings
Cup
Cup
Like the klein bottle, this cup only appears to be an illusion, every part of it fully realizable. But the sacramental cup, though offered, holds no water.
Lamp for Alistair
Form Zero
Alistair's heart was failing, he was already always fatigued as I began this series of drawings.
I showed him tiny versions of the early images on my iPod, to polite disinterest. Clearly my metaphors would remain my own.
Thus these enclosures of energy that so represent a person, hoard a slim ration of time and matter, therefore these interpenetrations and aspirations. The postulation of the spirit.
Over the next several months I drew nearly every day, a conscious labor of variations and meditations on life and spirit.
Lamp for Alistair
In, Out, Over, Through
Poison
Waters Within
Waters Within
So, there is no vessel in which the inside surface doesn't merge with the outside, except that it be sealed. The drawing of this painting shows the same spherical bottle, open, floating, within a beaked crock, that has been made magically transparent. In this rendition the golden liquid is too precious to expose, the sphere stoppered.
So, there is no vessel in which the inside surface doesn't merge with the outside, except that it be sealed. The drawing of this painting shows the same spherical bottle, open, floating, within a beaked crock, that has been made magically transparent. In this rendition the golden liquid is too precious to expose, the sphere stoppered.
Tokamak
I was talking with a young engineer named Ralph late one night. "This is it, Steve, I'm resigning SCI to take a job at the research facility in Princeton, NJ." That was where the fusion containment "bottle" was being devised. "Of course no one knows if they'll succeed, or even if they can succeed, but think of it--all the world's problems solved, safely, reliably!"
"It's impossible," I said. But even then the emerald glow had begun to burn in my imagination.
I was talking with a young engineer named Ralph late one night. "This is it, Steve, I'm resigning SCI to take a job at the research facility in Princeton, NJ." That was where the fusion containment "bottle" was being devised. "Of course no one knows if they'll succeed, or even if they can succeed, but think of it--all the world's problems solved, safely, reliably!"
"It's impossible," I said. But even then the emerald glow had begun to burn in my imagination.
Form Four
A puff of perfume, an overfilled demitasse. A sealed conjunction. The agitation tool represents external control, internal transformation.
Filter
Agitator
Atomizer
&
Containment of the Feminine Principle
The orange torroid can be inferred to move clockwise by pulse integration, or from bottom to top. Blued steel bands ensure the feminine principle will never be freed.
Bulbs
Vortex
Funnel
