All Fours

Painting in progress today. Mostly laying in the background and getting some of the shadow modeling done. An imaginary game of piggyback with some little grotesqueries.

All Fours

All Fours is the name of the game described in my dictionary of faiths and folklore. A game that has been played since pre-history and across species. It involves carrying one's young upon one's back for their amusement. You've almost certainly played this game with your children or young relatives in order to ingratiate yourselves with them. Once started, it seems this game never ends. What I've tried to go after is the utter indignity of this game for the grown animal!

Sketchbook

 A sketch for Abraham Men, a painting I'm planning. I've managed to use a character, the man with a stick horse, whose been rattling around my sketchbook for a few weeks. Abraham men were a class of beggars claiming to be lunatics allowed out of restraint in the Tudor and Stuart periods of England. They were pretending to be mad to palliate public's view of their begging and petty thievery.

I've returned to my theme of "All Fours", but this time I've elongated my person and given him more of a hunched animal appearance. I haven't decided how many riders to give him.

Sketchbook

 I've been working up a sketch based on some knowledge I've come across in a book of superstitions and folklore. It says that three spiders were worn about the neck in medieval through enlightenment times to cure an ague. It doesn't say that the spiders had to be dead, so that's what I've been running with. How would you wear three live spiders on your neck? The top sketch seems to have a very John Tenniel, Alice in Wonderland, flavor to it. The lower picture also has some fantastical neck stretching and even some bending. But so far, the upper picture is more interesting.

 "All Fours" is a game for entertaining children, in medieval times as now, where the adult gets on the floor and the children ride around on his or her back. I've tried to depict this in an exaggerated way. The adult looks pretty uncomfortable, but I think I could do better.