Between Flashes of Lightning

A little more than ten years ago, on my first long-term aid deployment in South Sudan, I helped evacuate a camp of around 4,000 people who had already been displaced by conflict and ended up in an area at risk of flooding. Rainy season was already well underway, but one night, about halfway through the evacuation, a huge storm broke, and in the flashes of lightning I saw a strange figure standing over my bed, a stag with the face of a man, but with exposed muscles like an anatomical model.

Obviously this was stress induced. I was working a physically demanding job from morning to night, in 45 degree sun during the day (and hoping to fall asleep before the generator shut down and the fan went off at night). I was recovering from malaria. And throughout my life I’ve suffered from bouts of sleep paralysis, seeing things that I dreamed about in the room with me for a few seconds after waking up. I knew this wasn’t real.

But, some time later I read about the ‘Ijiraq’, a shapeshifter in the Inuit religion. Unlike the half-man, half-caribou ‘Tariaksuq’, the Ijiraq can take any form it chooses. They live in a place between the worlds of the living and the dead, and can only be seen out of the corner of your eye, never observed directly. Perhaps you might catch a glimpse in the flashes of lighting during a thunderstorm? South Sudanese folklore has its own share of shapeshifters. One of my colleagues told stories about an island further down the Nile where men could turn into leopards, and a rather less dramatic tale of a cat that he himself had watched transform into a dog (which was how he knew it was really a man).

It’s been a busy month – between uncertainty at work in the aftermath of the US and UK government funding cuts, and a flurry of inspiration and activity on my PhD – so the miniatures on my painting desk are taking a little longer than I hoped. It’s also been a time of reflection for me, and a chance to draw a line under a few things. Finishing off a drawing that’s been sitting, half-inked, on top of a pile of magazines for a couple of years helps do that in a small way, and I think there’s some value in remembering other difficult times, and how art has helped me deal with them.

Like most of my drawings these days, this is inspired by the work of the late, great Russ Nicholson. Russ was a hero of mine from childhood. The magical, stylised worlds his artwork evoked probably did more than any other to set me on the path I’ve travelled through life. Rather than draw the bare concrete wall and mosquito net from my dream I tried to create a scene of the deep arctic, with strange shapes of wind-carved ice, sea-fog, and a blizzard in the endless night. And I think it’s been quite successful.

If anyone stumbles across this blog and would like to commission some artwork in the same style, send me a message. I’m rather slow, but in a world of AI art perhaps you’d like something personal. There’s more examples in my portfolio.