Old Friends and the influence of Cronos

Yesterday, I visited my parents, who came out to Pittsburgh from the Susquehanna Valley, where I was born and raised. With foam sheets, brown paper, and white packing twine, my father had carefully wrapped the three paintings you see below.

There is a fourth painting, which belongs to the first image you see below, but it's not appropriate for all audiences...if you know what I mean. This, folks, is a family-friendly blog. *snort* Well, it is!


Savannah Schroll Guz, "Wounded" from the Cadaver Series (2002)
acrylic, paper, book pages, turquoise glitter

Where does this blue-veined nakedness come from you ask? Back in college, I saw a Mexican horror film called Cronos (1993). I didn't realize it until recently, but it was done by Guillermo del Toros. (To see a New Yorker-produced video exploring more of his monsters, click on his name). In Cronos, once the scarab watch inserts its hidden and scorpion-style brass stinger into the elderly man's body, he begins to change physiologically. He grows perceptibly younger, becomes incredibly pale. His blue veins show beneath his skin. He develops a taste for blood. So, in effect, he becomes a vampire. The vampire part, I'm not so enraptured by, but the physical changes were fascinating to me. I still remember them to this day. And in 2002, this continued to show up in my art. 

Savannah Schroll Guz, "Hangman II (Pierrot)" (2002)
acrylic, paper, black glitter

(detail) "Hangman II (Pierrot)"

(detail) "Hangman II (Pierrot)"

I was so excited to see that the background of "Hangman" actually contains a web of gorgeous black glitter, which apparently wasn't part of the first image of the painting I posted here on the blog. It looks beautiful in ambient light in the evenings...well, the black glitter does. The drooling dude with the orange head covering, well, not so much. 

Savannah Schroll Guz, "Hangman"
from the Cadaver Series (2002)
acrylic, paper, black glitter







The Guillermo del Toro Codices

The New Yorker (my issue hasn't come yet....where are you, dear magazine? You are always late to my mailbox. Do you hesitate each week because you fear coming into West Virginia, lest you be beaten up? Understand, dear magazine, we are an open-minded people here) has apparently done a story on the artwork of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, whose monsters first take shape in elaborately decorated journals. Watch the New Yorker-produced video above, and you'll get to see the amazing detail of these works.

One of my favorite characters--and the best part, in my opinion, of Hellboy-- is the Angel of Death, whose eyes reside in her wings. I wrote the story, "North American Twilight", which also features the Angel of Death, before I saw del Toro's version in Hellboy, but I envision a similar creature, just one more cadaverous, growing ever more skeletal as she walks the earth, her skin hanging on her bones like old fabric. With del Toro's figure,  making the eyes inhabit the ridgy wing bones is genius (so much like the eyes of Argus that were later set, like gems, into peacock feathers by Hera.) The fact that they all blink at various intervals with a nearly audible click, sounding more physiological than mechanical, is totally arresting. I was smitten as soon as I saw it. I'm less sanguine about the bony crown, which looks somewhat like a flattened hip socket. Of course, this is only because I understand its function less. Why this shape? What purpose does such a calcification serve--is it a plate that protects a functioning brain? And then I think, *tsk-ing* Savannah, monsters don't need to have a form comprehensible to humans. It might have been a shape that arose fully formed in the filmmaker's mind, rather than being put together slowly, by a mental cutting-and-pasting of parts.