The Codex Chitipati

I've started on a group of works called The Codex Chitipati. It's kind of a fusion of Mexica deities, Mexica codices and some overtones of Himalayan imagery, among other things. The Chitipati were a brother and sister who were deep in meditation near a charnel ground when a murderous brigand decapitated them. They became, as I understand it, guardian spirits.

The Codex Chitipati is a series of portraits of Mexica Deities. I started with Xipe Totec. Xipe Totec is sometimes called The Flayed One which I suppose connects him to  both Marsyas and to certain depictions of flayed skin in Tibetan art. Xipetotec is also similar to Skinless Julia in Hellraiser 2.

This is a sketch for Xipetotec. I have a large number of these paper Halloween skeletons. They're kind of old and falling apart so I thought that I might have to recycle them. They're a real nice classic kind of  Halloween decor, some thing I remember from my childhood,  so I thought it worthwhile to extend their lives, in a manner of speaking. 

Dancing Xipetotec. There is a group of West African Masks that are marked in patterns  like the muscles of the human face. That's what the dancing skeletons are wearing. This is part of an artist's book. On the other side, is the image shown in  the blog post We Became Snakes.

Xipe Totec: A Page from the Codex Chitipati. It's quite a large page, measuring 41 inches by 57 inches.

I've moved on to Xochipili.

You can see these works at La Casa Azul Bookstore from October 22 until November 23, 2013. http://www.lacasaazulbookstore.com/

Dancing Xipe Totec

Study for Dancing Xipetotec

El Museo de las Cabezas, Volume One

The cover of El Museo de las Cabezas, one of my many visual journals. Originally, when I began this in 2006, I was going to call it Brain's Big Enough and the theme was going to be the brain. Brain's Big enough  transformed in to an exhibition of paintings that was called I Am Joe's Brain in 2009. So until 2010, Brain's Big Enough laid in a pile of journals that I decided to save until later.

In the fall of 2010, there was an exhibition of sculpture by Franz Xaver Messerschmidt at Neue Galerie,   link here  http://www.neuegalerie.org/exhibitions/messerschmidt I've been rather obsessed with Franz Xaver Messerscmidt since 1978, when I found him referred to in a book on Gustav Klimt. So I spent a lot of time in the fall of 2010 and the winter of 2011 sketching his "character heads" and day dreaming about them.

Originally, I was going to call this journal The Facebook but I realized that there really is too much Facebook permeating the world. So, El Museo de las Cabezas was born. 

Tlingit helmet mask and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. 

Eventually, Franz Zaver Messerschmidt left Neue Galerie and in the summer of 2011, Nancy Grossman arrived at PS 1 MOMA, link here  http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/333

Their relationship to each other seems obvious. After all, my brain's big enough.

Nancy Grossman's head and Lord Pacal.

Eventually, I had to finish the book with various sundry other heads. There is a book called El Museo de las Cabezas, Volume Two, but I'm still working on it. 

The back cover.

We Became Snakes

I've been drawing a lot these days. I'm fascinated by snakes and I like to draw them. This drawing is gouache and acrylic with little collaged pigs that I found in a cooring book about agriculture in New York State. A child had colored the little guy pink and I scanned it and printed a bunch. I now have hundreds of these little paper pigs floating around. Drawing these Tibetan flames is really a nice meditation. 

It's called "We Became Snakes, " after an album by Saccharin Trust. Yeah, I'm a fan of Eighties Hardcore.

Click on the picture. It looks really nice when it gets bigger. 

Codex Paradoxa Metamorphosis

These are pages from  a book I made called Codex Paradoxa Metamorphosis. The title comes from a book illustrated by Maria Sibylla Merian, in the 1600's. My book is an accordion book, based on a Meso-American model. The pages measure 20 inches by 30 inches and are attached to each other by red string. When it is completely unfolded, Codex Paradoxa Metamorphosis stretches twenty feet long. I showed this book at La Casa Azul Bookstore in New York from October until December.