Born Under
A Bad Sign
Artwork for "The Art Of Superstition" an Illustrators Ireland show hosted by The Copper House, Dublin running from the 11th to the 31st October 2013.
Superstitions are those things we turn to when we need an explanation to what we can't explain. They are fear to fight fear. From small rituals to big religions. For a superstitious person, as Albert King seems to say in the song that gives name to the piece, it is better to have bad luck than no luck at all.
The Process: What is a superstition?
One of my all-time favorite books came to the rescue. A masterwork on anthropology where superstition, myth and religion are all put under scrutiny; revealing what it is that makes us humans.
The second thing that came to mind was the excellent song and album by Albert King that gives the title to the final piece.
Finally, to construct the allegory I had in mind, I resorted to the same classical source that many painters in History would have used.
All I had to now was look up how superstition would have been represented. This is what I found:
And so, the subsequent tattoos reflected others known superstitions like Lucky Number 13 or the albatross from Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner…
The idea is that we go from relatively trivial superstitions on the character’s right arm tattooes to the ones in the character’s left arm: the main world religions.
And so, I started working in the main tattoo of the character’s right arm: a representation of Superstition straight from Caesar Ripa’s book.
