Dumuzi (Mud Variations)

Art by: Christopher Patton

Artist Notes

Artist Notes

EARTH ENVELOPE

These images are spun off from my book Dumuzi, which Gaspereau Press published this spring.

Dumuzi is the Sumerian god of spring growth & return, and so also, decay & loss, despair. The book doesn’t retell his story so much as break it up and refract it kaleidoscopically among other found materials: overheard conversations; newspaper pieces; my own old poems & dream transcripts. In the last ten years I’ve sunk into what a friend who got here before me calls a composting practice. All materials are found materials, in this practice. And as a dying-and-rising god, Dumuzi just is holy compost.

Each image here has two parts: a black figure, a mud-coloured ground. The figures I drew from a piece of security envelope lining—a scrap that to my eye holds worlds, jumbled & jammed in, as in a suitcase packed for flight. I scanned it & copied & recopied it to make a digital template. The figures I had seen angles of started to come out and stretch their limbs: demons, hungry ghosts, bodhisattvas; eggs, eagles, sea serpents, gods & goddesses; infants swaddled in fresh leaves, blasted trees on stretches of broken ground. On a transparent overlay, I inked what belonged to the form I saw, and when I pulled the overlay off, it was a figure. (More about the process here and here.)

The mud-colored ground is actual earth. With a friend who practices red ochers, I took stones from nearby Sumas Mountain, ground them down in mortar and pestle, and added water and a bit of egg white as fixative. Because I hadn’t chosen well, ground well, or mixed well, the material was not much more than liquidy red-tinged mud. I finger painted some stuff I was feeling and put the images away for later use.


Christopher Patton

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Artist Notes

EARTH ENVELOPE

These images are spun off from my book Dumuzi, which Gaspereau Press published this spring.

Dumuzi is the Sumerian god of spring growth & return, and so also, decay & loss, despair. The book doesn’t retell his story so much as break it up and refract it kaleidoscopically among other found materials: overheard conversations; newspaper pieces; my own old poems & dream transcripts. In the last ten years I’ve sunk into what a friend who got here before me calls a composting practice. All materials are found materials, in this practice. And as a dying-and-rising god, Dumuzi just is holy compost.

Each image here has two parts: a black figure, a mud-coloured ground. The figures I drew from a piece of security envelope lining—a scrap that to my eye holds worlds, jumbled & jammed in, as in a suitcase packed for flight. I scanned it & copied & recopied it to make a digital template. The figures I had seen angles of started to come out and stretch their limbs: demons, hungry ghosts, bodhisattvas; eggs, eagles, sea serpents, gods & goddesses; infants swaddled in fresh leaves, blasted trees on stretches of broken ground. On a transparent overlay, I inked what belonged to the form I saw, and when I pulled the overlay off, it was a figure. (More about the process here and here.)

The mud-colored ground is actual earth. With a friend who practices red ochers, I took stones from nearby Sumas Mountain, ground them down in mortar and pestle, and added water and a bit of egg white as fixative. Because I hadn’t chosen well, ground well, or mixed well, the material was not much more than liquidy red-tinged mud. I finger painted some stuff I was feeling and put the images away for later use.


Christopher Patton

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In the Classroom


Christopher Patton

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