Atlas Of Dreams-ColorPlate 102

As this image neared completion, I kept having a couple of lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime Of The Ancient Mariner” go through my head whenever I looked at it: “Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs / Upon the slimy sea”. These sea monsters may not have legs, but I’d wager that they’re slimy enough. The swirl of colors in the image also give it an oily character, which works well with some of the next lines from “Rime”: “The water, like a witch's oils, / Burnt green, and blue, and white”. And red, and gold, and blue in this case... Oddly, while Gustave Doré did illustrate the “Rime”, I took this particular engraving from his illustrations for “Paradise Lost” instead. But hey, you can’t fault the guy for wanting an excuse to draw sea monsters. Sea monsters are awesome... well, unless you’re at sea. And anyway, he put some angels up in the sky for relevance to the work he was illustrating.

“Color Plate 102” combines an engraving from Gustave Doré's illustrations for “Paradise Lost”, an image from Landsat 7, and a “spin art painting” created by my father, Gus Maier.

"The Atlas Of Dreams" is an ongoing project started in 1999. Each plate is composed of several different images combined to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Source images include historic engravings, NASA photos of space and the Earth's surface, abstract images, the artwork of my father: Gus Maier, and of course my own artwork - recycled and reused. Watch out for stray butterflies, fish, snakes, and other animals...