Fauna Artist Quentin Bartholomew | The Spirit In the Marshes

The Spirit in the Marshes is the narrative of a dream condensed into an image. The dream itself was a recent one I had, and began in a house made entirely out of glass, situated in the middle of an otherwise deserted swamp. There was a legend of a beast roaming out there, a ghostly moose, in my mind a spirit representative of Paleolithic megafauna. I was determined to hunt this beast, but also wary of it. In the back of my mind I knew that the spirit hunted me just as I hunted it. It was a heavy presence throughout the experience. I did not glimpse the creature until just before I woke from the dream, when it loomed like a black shadow before me. In the painting, interpretation of the dream is not my goal, but rather an honest and personal representation of the experience.

The base of this painting is a digital collage of several photographs, printed on photography paper. I destroyed a great deal of the original print with alcohol, the process by which I created the fog and geometric frame around the figure’s head. The application of alcohol is very different for these effects, and is very carefully used, as the alcohol is very aggressive with the printed ink. Multiple layers of diluted oil paint were also applied to the print. The runny paint was allowed to drip, both upwards and down as I spun the painting, paralleling the uncontrolled aspects of dreaming itself.

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