To begin with, synaesthesia and sensory experience in general are central themes of the play, and the story involves a mysterious solar storm (the titular vortex). Based on these elements, I came up with rough drafts for two designs. The first focused on the vortex, and references the romance plot that emerges over the course of the play:

…while the second, building on the synaesthesia element, centered on sensory imagery:

This second image was my personal favorite (the first turned out more “touched-by-an-angel-y” than I would have liked), and the writers agreed, and so I got to work on a more polished version. I redid the surface of the hand, intensifying the colors and reworking the patterning to include more spiral imagery in reference to the vortex. I also redrew the “sensory glyphs”, and brought warmer tones to both them and the text:

The playwrights requested a broader range of warm colors and imagery evoking solar flares and other astronomical phenomena.  Once again, I did up a pair of different designs, taking the suggested changes in a couple directions, the first quieter:

…the second more dramatic:

Ultimately, this final image was the winner.  As a bonus to you, good reader, the preceding images can be printed out to create one of the world’s stranger flipbooks.

Vortex of the Great Unknown by the Tangled Leaves Theatre Collective will be performed this June (dates TBA).  It’s a marvelous play, and I heartily recommend checking it out.

The inspiration (and source of the accompanying text) is Fort’s Book of the Damned (1919), a massive tome that consists largely of hundreds upon hundreds of accounts of strange objects and substances falling from the sky, obsessively gathered from centuries worth of almanacs, scientific journals, and eyewitness accounts, and interspersed with flagrantly bizarre stabs at explanation (at one point, he proposes the existence of an antigravitational atmospheric zone- the “super-sargasso sea”- where lost objects end up and are occasionally dislodged by errant wind currents).  These explanations are, I suspect, tongue-in-cheek, intended not so much to provide a believable theory to account for these events as to show what such a theory would have to look like.

The paintings are oil on wood, ranging from 24×18″ to 10×8″ in size.  Ultimately, for each painting, the corresponding text will be printed on a separate panel, matching the width of the painting and displayed directly below it.  Better images to come.

The Falls: silk

“…there is mention of a fibrous substance like blue silk that fell over Naumberg, March 23, 1665″

The Falls: flakes

“Upon March 3, 1876, at Olympian Springs, Bath County, Kentucky, flakes of a substance that looked like beef fell from the sky- ‘from a clear sky’.”

The Falls: paper

“Substance like charred paper fell in Norway and other parts of Northern Europe, Jan. 31, 1686″

The Falls: worms

“London Times, April 14, 1837:  That, in the parish of Bramford Speke, Devonshire, a large number of black worms, about three quarters of an inch in length, had fallen in a snowstorm.”

The Falls: disk

“A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20, 1887.”

Alternately: Wolfgang & Sprout, the Neolithic Era’s foremost comedy duo

Khepri (female)

Comedian Beetle

seriously guys, he’s just trying to write his memoirs. keep it down.