Doing creative stuff is a joy. Not being musical myself, I can only imagine the pleasure musicians have messing around with their instruments. If it's anything like the way I feel about making paintings, I bet it's pretty good. That super positive mood is what I wanted to achieve with this painting.

Once I began to get more specific about my own personal ambitions things came into focus. I really want my kids to get a chance to visit the moon. It feels so possible somehow. Tying the Watchers desire to escape back to the stars to my own desire to have humanity do the same felt like an important touchstone to keep this painting personal.

In the fiction of Angelarium, Samyaza shows up and just starts being the boss. No threats. Just a commanding stature and an air of wisdom. A lot about holding power is just nailing the right tone. I figure that holds true as much today as it did at the dawn of mankind.

When the Watchers were a chorus, they had no names. They were formless and as one. Each Angel whispered together amidst the song of the cosmos. They sang of nothing and everything. No will or thought, only light. A boundless existence.

As they sang, a single mote of something, of nothing, passed through the Angel’s light and cast a speck of a shadow down upon the earth. Beneath the stars, that shadow looked back at the heavens and saw himself for the first time. In that moment he took a name. Samyaza.

One by one, Samyaza called out for his brethren and they bowed to meet him. He was the giver of names. Lord and king. There were none before him and none after.

The fair and childlike Kokabiel saw things in the stars that his brother Watchers did not. To him, he saw unknowable mysteries unfolding in the night sky. Men came to him, with hopes of divining some earthly meaning behind the movement of the heavenly bodies. Though he spoke with them often, it was difficult to take real information from his readings. The places and things that he described were in vivid detail, but failed to resemble the world in which they lived. At first, the obtuse quality of Kokabiel’s information was seen as a form of higher wisdom, beyond the reach of men’s minds. As time went on, many thought him mad.

Kokabiel longed to return to be among the stars again, forgoing all worldly concerns. As tragedy mounted around him, he did not see it, blinded by the glare of celestial light.

In continuing my quest of fleshing out Angelarium as an angelic encyclopedia, I'm revisiting Rahab, Angel of the Deep.

Rahab ferried the bodies of the dead into the sea. His promise to mankind was to bring them to a place where they would never be disturbed. They prayed that the abyss would give the dead peace. No one could know for sure except the grim Watcher. That dark place was his home and his alone. The passage into darkness was a place of no return. That is its nature. 

In continuing my journey of fleshing out Angelarium as an angelic encyclopedia, I'm revisiting Suphlatus, Angel of Dust.

Suphlatus built a growing collection of halls and spires that cracked the desert horizon. Each one, it’s own a jagged landscape. Every day, men would witness the Angel’s latest creations and each night they would cheer as he brought them down. As this cycle became commonplace, the only fanfare came at their destruction. 

As children, we tear at flowers and rip the limbs from trees. Their transformation excites us. It’s only later that we learn that these changes are permanent. A thing comes into our world and then, with our own hands, we usher it away. Unmaking it. We live peacefully alongside the cycle of creation and annihilation. It passes us by. It’s only natural.

In continuing my quest to flesh out Angelarium as an encyclopedia of angels, I'm revisiting Turiel, Angel Of The Mountain.

I really wanted to expand in the ideas behind him. Wealth and power are things that so many of us desire, and yet their corrupting influence is so evident. In stories, you see this contradiction brought to life with lonely kings and greedy dragons.

The mountain is a beautiful thing to behold, but always treacherous.

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The goal with the colors, was to break away from the Lament for Icarus painting by Herbert James Draper and make something that incorporated much more of the palette from the original Sathariel piece.

As the second Watcher of the South, Sathariel stayed close to his master’s side. While Samyaza created the flax of truth, Sathariel would spin that truth into a thread and weave it into the very reality around him. Beyond his smoothly guided words and expressive gestures, his skin itself brought his tales to life. The patterns of his wings would flex and flow with his impersonations, driving the excitement of any congregation to rapt attention.

When his heart was pierced, no one saw it for what it was. His death was met with great applause, for its realism.

There is another side to the themes from Ananiel I want to approach with this piece. The original one was about the feeling of starting something you don't have the power to stop. For a lot of people that resonated with feelings of addiction. While the original was more centered on the powerlessness of that feeling, I want this one to be more of the false power that comes with it. 

The Watchers are being revived! I’m starting with Baraqiel.

After months of anticipation (on my part), I'm back to working on the black sheep of the Angelarium family. Getting back to doing some darker pieces has me excited. I've been doing moody black and white studies recently and it's been whetting my palette to start a full fledged piece like this.

The rituals Baraqiel performed were an object of fascination for both men and Angels alike. He brought to them the gift of tamed lightning. Despite the widespread appreciation for the fruits of this work, few volunteered to assist. Baraqiel was known not only for the power he commanded, but also his lack of respect for it. His fall was the first to prove that Watchers were not complete in their wisdom or their immortality.