Style1½ inches thick (3.75 cm) Product Details Artist grade canvas, archival inks, wooden stretcher bars, and UVB protective coating
AvailablityUsually ships within five business days. ArtistEric Brown CollectionMirovia
Description Of Buri, sire of Borr, grandsire of Odin, deep I peered into the soul of this being; this stowaway. I knew not from whence his story came, for it was not of my telling. And for the first time, I knew sorrow. For the first time, I knew fear. Still, I freed him from the rime frost; suckled him until his spark had returned; until he could speak his tale. From the North he had come, riding upon a great metal ship, harnessing the power of a thousand, thousand suns, to breach the unbreakable barrier, crossing the endless seas of time and space, crossing even the great, blinding Maelstrom that marks the beginning and end of each age, through the Gunnungagap. And I saw in him my doom. Still, I harbored him; nurtured him as he grew from shadow to substance; bathed him in the living etyr.This painting depicts Buri, grandfather to Odin, great-grandfather to Thor, the first of the Aesir. In the Norse creation myth, the gods did not create the universe. It was inhabited by the primordial demoness, Ymir, long before they arrived. Buri was discovered by Ymir frozen in the rime frost. Ymir freed Buri, nurtured him to health, even offered him her own daughter as a mate. Buris progeny, led by Odin, would eventually slaughter Ymir, fashioning the world as we know it upon her bones: the heavens from her hollowed scull; the fertile lands from her flesh; the merciless seas from her blood. Ive always found fascination in this creation myth, hanging on the feintest whisper of an all but forgotten past, slipping down through the ages against all odds. It awakens in me the spirit of these ancients from the cold north. For I have walked the frozen plains. I have sailed the winter sea. I have heard the call of the lone wolf in the night. I have faced the long dark of the endless winter.Ymir's Tale started as a digital photo of myself taken while hiking at Pixley Falls in New York. Yeah, I know, a bit presumptuous to cast myself as the progenitor of Odin and Thor. What can I say? I isolat
Eric Brown, Sherrill, NY Member Since November 2011 Artist Statement People often tell me that my work depicts the imaginary. I guess what they mean is that I don’t paint the real world – you know, still-lifes, landscapes, portraits. But I don't see it that way. The world is insane. Insane and horrific. And undeniably beautiful.
All of my work deals with this truth. I don’t replicate the mundane because for me, the mundane is the fiction. The fruit in that bowl – it was born in the decaying flesh of a thousand creatures that once clung desperately to life. And even now, the fruit plays host to a horde of maggots, writhing just beneath the surface. To paint it any other way is to tell a lie.
That landscape – it was forged of the cast off detritus of a billion dying stars, forged through mind numbingly complex geological processes that spanned eons. That rock in the foreground, the one casting the pleasing shadow upon the grass, it was once part of a great ridge bisecting the continent of Pangaea, a ridge in whose shadow behemoths prowled some two hundred million years before man took his first clumsy step.
And that portrait – just thirty layers of dead skin encasing an organism created through an imperfect reproductive process resulting in no fewer than sixty unexpected mutations, any of which might result in horrific disfigurement, or abilities that far surpass anything that could be called human. Does the portrait capture the being's fathomless ability for kindness? Or cruelty?