Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

If you’ve been following the “Hanging Around The House” posts¹, you have a pretty good sense of what kind of stuff decorates the walls around here.

New stuff is coming in at a slow, but constant rate–indeed at the moment I have a small Barry Windsor-Smith print, and a larger Tom Canty print off at the framers–but typically has to rest for a while before I do anything with it. I’m starting to run out of walls.

However, I can’t help get really excited when original art comes in. It doesn’t matter if it’s gigantic original paintings², or original art from comics. For the most part, the comic art doesn’t end up on the walls–it ends up in a portfolio–but there are exceptions that I get excited enough about to frame.

One of the comic artists I really dig is Scott Morse. If you were following the series, you will have seen that I own six pages of the original art from Soulwind: the “cats & process philosophy” pages, and the final four pages with the “satori climax” moment.

I love these pages, and I really like the faux-Japanese inkbrush style Morse used on them. However, this style is very different from how Morse’s work looks today, and I felt like I should have something in the collection that captures his current style.

So, when I saw a chance to grab one of the painted original pages from his book VOLCANIC REVOLVER, I jumped. You can literally see Morse’s style evolving in this book.

The book was published in black & white³, but the framing sequences that open and close the book were painted and reproduced in a greyscale⁴. It turns out these pieces were painted in colour, a yellow/blue combination that doesn’t seem out of line with Morse’s current works, but which also was likely chosen to reproduce well in the two-tone print.

And I now own one of these pages.

Here’s roughly how it looked in the printed product–you’ll have to imagine that there were some speech ballons on the page:

Well, here’s how it looks if you have access to the original colour painting:

That image is a link to a ridiculously high-resolution scan, where you can see the details of the brushwork, and where you can see the texture of the paper. That hi-res scan is more for me than for you–I’ll probably break chunks off of it and make them into wall papers, etc.

I think I’ll be getting this piece framed sometime in the near future.

1. Man, I should really finish that…two more posts should bring us up to date.(back)
2. …which, if I ever get around to finishing the series, you will see(back)
3. Well, “brown & white” or “sepia & white” really, but it’s two-tone anyway…(back)
4. “brownscale”?(back)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 10:36 am and is filed under Storytime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.