A new project...

I've been secretly planning a new project for six months now, and Halloween seems like the best time to announce it.

For the past few years I've been fixating on the Calendrier Magique - a magical calendar by Austin de Croze and Manuel Orazi made to document the year in magic for 1896. 

This is the image for January 1896.  We have a large-scale reproduction of this hanging in our living room.  The entire calendar can be viewed online at the website of the Fantastic in Art and Fiction archives, a department of Cornell University's library.

I've been planning my own version for the year 2013.  I've been reading, taking notes, sketching, taking photographs and making tests.  I should probably not be mentioning this until the release is a bit nearer, but honestly I've been keeping it quiet for so long that I can't hold back any longer.

The images will be created via photographs, photo collage and mixed media. 

Rather than rush to release my "calendar" as a bound piece at the beginning of the year, I've decided to release a very limited number of prints of each month as it arrives.  People will be able to collect a single month, or the entire year's worth of images.

I'm still sorting out some of the logistics, and am very open to suggestions.

I'll have more to say (and show) about this project soon.  If this is of interest to you, please let me know!

Returning

I've decided to return to Blogspot.  Wordpress just didn't work out.

I've been more quiet than usual for a lot of reasons.  A list of things that I've been up to lately:

1.  Getting married.  Jane and I got married on August 12th.  The whole thing was incredible.

2.  Honeymoon in Vienna.  Also amazing.  We spent ten days eating tortes, drinking coffee, wandering through art museums and marveling at the magnificent city.  Having been obsessed with serpent symbolism lately, I told Jane that I was going to document snakes on our honeymoon.  Every time we turned the corner, we found more snakes:  statues, paintings, mosaics, etc. 

I also said that I wanted to find this Sethian altar that I'd heard rumors about.  We found it in the first wing of the first museum we visited in the city.

3.  Working on my red book, the last handmade book in my long-running alchemical book cycle.  While this video is mainly about the white book, Albedo, there is information about the in-progress red book at the end.

 4.  Venturing out into the woods to take more Earth Magic photographs before the harsh Chicago winter sets in.

5.  Along with Jane, planning, building, launching and maintaining the new website Occult Guide.  Occult Guide is a website dedicated to building a worldwide map of user-submitted locations of occult interest.  The site has been online for two months now, with some amazing locations having been added already.

6.  Research, development and tests for other future art projects.

I can't say much more right now, but I can say with confidence that 2013 is going to be an amazing year.