Oaksan Comics are making their triumphant return this August - four new covers are currently in the works to be released this month, with another four slated for release Sept through Oct.
Read MoreTwo thousand, two hundred and forty years ago on this day…
June 21, 217 B.C.E.
During the second Punic War in Northern Italy by a lake that still exists – Lake Trasimeno, the legendary Carthaginian General, Hannibal Barca and his mercenary army defeated the Romans in a night ambush so clever and daring it still amazing military tacticians to this day. As I mention in my Gallery Page, there is a chance my ancestors participated in this victory, fighting on behalf of the Insubres tribe, founders of Mediolanum (modern-day Milan) who were displaced by the Romans, later to settle in Bohemia.
As a classical history buff, Hannibal is my great darling, and as I study him further, I find my appreciation for him to only increase. After almost twenty years of study and several ideas for various compositions, I choose this one for the confluence of brilliance, ancestry, and sheer drama – that all combine to make this a unique composition. And as always, I aimed so that anyone familiar with the Second Punic War would instantly recognize this moment from history and would be able to name both Ducarious and Consul Flaminius with only a moment’s glance.
Started in 2018, I have worked on this piece intermittently for five years and am happy to finally release it on my site. Once again, please reach out to me on my various social platforms to let me know what you think of this latest piece. Cheers!
https://www.michaeljameslinder.com/#/ratt/
- MJL
New Animated MJL Logo
Learning lesson… not perfect, but Voltron functional.
Time-lapse Experiment →
I recently experimented with some time-lapse photography. I was disappointed in the completed work, a portrait of actor John Barrymore, but rewarded by the filming/editing process. Hopefully more time-lapse videos are on the horizon.
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Based on a one of a kind photo* of Eastern European troops before being shipped to the front lines of World War II. In the composition, you see the faces of doubt and innocence on the precipice of participating in the war that changed the world. *This photo was provided to me by my mother’s husband, Allen Zicherman, the photo features his father (the young man to the right of the Officer in the front row), however many details have been lost as his family were victims of the Holocaust, with many family members murdered in camps and much of the family history being lost forever. Despite these odds, this photo remains, and I consider it the great honor of my artistic career to attempt to render this timeless and precious image into a worthy homage to the men it features and the sacrifice of so many soldiers throughout history whose names, and hence participation, are lost to our recollection, and yet the infrastructure of our civilization is built squarely on their collective physical and spiritual votive offerings to the future generations that would passively forget them.
New masterwork has begun... "Off to war: the officer and his boys"
Octopus
Day 5 - These photos are actually from October 2019 - the ink portion of this piece is finished and I’m coloring the piece at present.
Day 2 - Just started this octopus study (October 2019)
Day 3
The first-final draft, as I call it, is now within reach. Just another 10 hours or so and I’ll either post it or burn it. If the former, I’ll probably put in another 8 hours on top of that tightening everything I can.
UPDATE: I finished this piece and ended up hating it. This happens, not all attempts work-out - and only the artist can be the ultimate judge of their own work.
Day 2
This is usually around the time I start to hate a piece. I start to think I choose the wrong subject, or got lazy with some of the creative choices.
This is always the time to put your head down and keep going. Work on it until you love or can’t ever look at it again - either way, you saw it complete. Unfinished art is like money left buried and forgotten by time - no good to anyone.
Been dormant too long...
Just started… raw sketch, a little stencil help… plan to ink this in the style of Balinese Tattoos. Vast pattern detail coming but strong contrast / weight as well. (Hope to make a whole series of these, let’s see how this turns out/ is received.
That New New...
New Release
Been working eight days a week... but now I'm ready to premiere my new work(s). Click on the link, visit my site check it out...
Sketch Thursday
Coming Soon
Alexander Sacks the Mallians
In the works since 2014, I'm finally ready to debut this masterwork on my site. Look for the release on my Twitter account by Jan 1, 2018 at the latest.
My return to 7th grade crafts class....
I needed a custom "scaffold" to go with my new easel. No retailer produced exactly what I needed so I decided to craft my own.
Most of the materials I sourced from Michael's, however the screws, knobs, and rubber bumpers I got from Home Depot.
Most of my canvases are 18'' by 24'' so I needed the main scaffold to extend at least 24'' to be able to reach the center of the canvas from any angle. But I occasionally work on larger canvases, and for that I crafted a second (more traditional) dowel scaffold that has a 37'' reach.
The 24'' scaffold was constructed of 1/2'' Pine, which allows me to get very close to the canvas, without the scaffold flexing or bending at all (a giant pet-peeve of mine). On the flat exterior of the 24'' I mounted two strips of suede where my hand will rest. On the handle of 37'' scaffold I wound a suede strip for better grip.
At the head of each scaffold (on the interior), at the point where the scaffold will stabilize against the easel, I mounted a soft-rubber node with a screw, and placed the mount within a soft-sponge, which can provide lateral stabilization (while in the rare case where you mount on the canvas - it will be gentle on the surface).
The most important factor to me, and the one completely missing from all retail versions, was the perpendicular handle or knob.
Underneath the knob, I lined the wood with a padded rubber cover. On the reverse interior, I lined the wood surface with hard plastic nodes, including around the screw for the knob, which will protect the canvas and the work.
Here's the final product in action.
It's winter, the sun is long down by the time I get home from the office. I had to take these on my lunch break - no, I don't normally draft in white button-ups.
I'm as proud as a 2nd grader with his macrame masterpiece.
Head study for an upcoming Dragon piece I'm presently designing.
Dragon Head Study
"Alexander sacks the Mallians"
My present project comes from the ancient Roman historian Arrian, who authored one of the most complete biographies of Alexander III of Macedon. Sourcing the records of Ptolemy, now lost to modern history, Arrian tells of one of Alexander's closest brushes with death in attempting to sack the Mallians, an Indian tribe along the Hydraotes River. And if that's not pretentious enough for you, follow this link to a video of me reading this blerg in a monocle and a smoking jacket.
Thermopylae
As a certified classical history buff, I'm fascinated by the Persian Wars as recorded by the historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and for years I wanted to create a piece based on his landmark work. My first reading of “Les Histories” was in 2003, and ever since my imagination has been illuminated with visions of this monumental conflict. But, for years in the interim, I went back and forth between being obsessed with the subject and then feeling it was an exhausted topic considering all the movies and comics and so forth. In the end, despite my trepidation, I felt Thermopylae warranted a more thoughtful piece than what Frank Miller has made popular recently, and as well as a more realistic treatise than the ridiculous neo-classical version Jacques-Louis David put forth a few centuries back. Somewhere between these two interpretations lies the real occurrence. One of my loftier goals as an illustrator is to generate works as if I was a war-photographer participating in classical history – capturing frame by frame occurrences not since studied from such a candid perspective. After years of research and contemplation, I decided I would begin my classical series with Leonidas and his Spartan retinue.
Months of drafting went into each figure. I sourced as many actual archeological artifacts as possible to place in the composition: swords from the Museum at Persepolis; the famous calf-skin leather shoes of the Persians (found in warriors’ graves throughout Asian minor); textile patterns from the stone reliefs at Babylon, Susa and Persepolis; the legendary Corinthian helmets of the Peloponnesians with their distinctly Laconic sideways plums; and popular iconography of Laconic heroes such as Hercules from coins and armor of the 5th century BC. I made every effort from my novice historical study to be as accurate as possible in the creation of this composition.
Thermopylae looms large in the collective consciousness of history buffs world-wide, and as a result, every generation a new Hollywood epic is financed and released reimagining the legendary conflict (and all are equally, ridiculously inaccurate). However, by the numbers (troops engaged, casualties accounted for, etc..) Thermopylae was nothing more than a minor skirmish. Many historians even argue the battle was tactically insignificant. Therefore why do these three days echo so loudly throughout history?
The first factor is Thermopylae is factual history that plays out like an ancient myth. Herodotus’ work “Les Histories”, in which this battle was first transcribed, actually gave our language the word "History," and hence the entire era surrounding this conflict quite literally straddles the sacred precipice between historic and prehistoric human occurrences. Conversely it is this straddling that leads the Persian Wars to also be one of the most questioned and debated events of the Classical world. Herodotus’ accuracy has been in question since antiquity, and remains so to this day. Even if Herodotus exaggerated or fabricated large portions of his history, Thermopylae is still a watershed for Hellenic culture, and this brings us to our second reason, which is the propaganda significance of the Spartan sacrifice. Even if the engagement was tactically insignificant, the affect of the story was a cornerstone example of Hellenic virtue throughout the ancient world, in the similar fashion as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 are to modern Americans. Thermopylae inspired the likes of Xenophon, Alexander, Pyrrhus, Hannibal, Caesar and countless others. The legend touted Western virtue from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.
However, the general popularity of this battle has led to far reaching misinterpretation and contemporary projection upon the unworthy Spartans. Laconic culture is a mixture of sadistic and ignorant overindulgences, fueled by violence and hatred. Modern western people would view their practices as an equal mix National Socialism and the Spanish Inquisition. Almost everything that was innovative about ancient Hellenism was taken to radical and unhealthy extremes in Spartan hands. Spartans didn’t breed and train soldiers, they engineered and enfranchised an entire class of killers; individuals more animal than human in terms of moral function and emotional range. The entire ancient world was terrified of these armored sociopaths. It was only in this singular function, as hired killers repelling a foreign invasion horde that the Spartans truly served greater Hellas. Eventually, Sparta’s failure to produce fully functioning human-beings doomed the entire Hellenic world when they took power of the Aegean in the wake of the Peloponnesian War, some 50 years after the events of Thermopylae. I would argue, one of the only positive contributions of Laconic culture to antiquity, aside from being a motivational opposition to the innovative Athenians, was the three days the Spartans held the pass at Thermopylae in the autumn of 480 BC.
Despite this vital role of the Spartans in the eventual Hellenic victory, I lament that my work could bolster the wide-spread but misplaced worship of Laconic heroism. Spartans as a culture were the most successful slavers in the history of western civilization, and were outnumbered by their slave population (labeled the Helots) by nearly ten to one. This population imbalance is the real reason for the Spartan's consistent and highly developed combat acumen and martial skill; without which, they would have simply been over-run by the masses of this subjugated class. Spartans were unimaginably cruel to their slaves. They waged an annual war of terror on the Helots, as a celebrated tradition, and random lynching and tortures were daily occurrences. For a Spartan to murder a Helot was not described as “killing” in the ancient Greek common tongue, but rather “culling” as if the Helots were livestock. Helots hated the Spartans so much, Thucydides described them as “ready and willing to eat the Spartan’s raw.” Once an individual was designated a member of the Helot class, there was only one reprieve available and that was to assist their Spartans masters in combat (See Figure H1).
My composition, therefore, is not a celebration of Peloponnesian virtue, but rather a terse recognition of the crucial role these killers played in the founding of our civilization. We should study the Spartans as they were, not project on them what we want them to be – and to that end, I wished to convey both the glory and the gore in an honest treatise of this distant event.
Classical history is a minefield littered with this dichotomy between virtue and shame. On the one hand, civilization in its infancy can be forgiven certain over-indulgences, but at the same time historians both novice and professional should be wary of being either overly forgiving or accusatorial when debating Classical culture. All participants are equally savage and primal to the modern perspective. Yet our physicality in comparison to these ancient people is nearly exact. Meaning, the human animal has not changed, only human behavior and culture has evolved. This makes it very easy to be judgmental and lament their base logic but it also makes it fascinating to image your own participation in these ancient events – for the humans that did participate were almost identical to yourself. Only unlike yourself, they lacked the many shoulders of the many cultural giants who existed between then and now and hence, you see the world from a significantly better vantage point, if even while utilizing the exact same eyes as our ancient ancestors.