Jerome Goldnose:Handmade Digital Art

New Saints Triptych (2003)

These three works are my first successful attempts to create digital art: A young woman smiling, destined to be a saint in a bleak world, a woman gave birth to her to-be saint son, destined to become a martyr in this dying world, a dying saint, a young man, a fish watching him from a polluted sea. The description for all three works in this series is the same:

In these series I tried to combine the idea of a religious painting with the way we have come to look at our future: dark, filled with industrial waste, or maybe we are living on other planets, who knows. What will our saints look like? Will there ever be new saints when we leave our solar system? Or is this an Earth-bound phenomenon?

The idea of having saints in the dark future that might lie ahead could be comforting one, we might really need them. Or maybe the idea is an impossible one, I don’t know.

Size: 47x67cm @300dpi
Pixelsize: 5551px*7915px
Origin: Composition made with photos, scans from books and magazines, some 3D.

Why New Saints? Why Alien Saints?

Whenever I meet punks who are begging for scraps, I tend to see them as the modern day mendicant monks, beger monks living on alms – maybe we should ask them to pray for us after we have given them some coins. They know what it is to endure hardship, to suffer. I think it is about time we start to acknowledge that they are our modern day saints, our martyrs, our very own holy men and women. I think it would be fitting.

An interesting quote

For a while I was obsessed with a story coming from the research done by J.G. Frazer (one of the of the founding fathers of the study of anthropology) that can be found in a book called ‘The Golden Bough’:

“A register of al the incarnate gods in the Chinese Empire is kept in the Li Fan Yüan or Colonial Office at Peking. The number of gods who have thus taken out a license is one hundred and sixty. Tibet is blessed with thirty of them, Northern Mongolia rejoices in nineteen and Southern Mongolia basks in the sunshine of no less than fifty-seven. The Chinese government with a paternal solicitude for the welfare of its subjects, forbids the gods on the register to be reborn anywhere but in Tibet.”

Based on the time of publication of the book this must have existed around the end of the 19th century. But even then: how on earth did humans do that? Why oh why do you create a bureaucracy for gods who are supposedly living in our midst? It beats me. Even Kafka – or even Terry Gilliam for that matter – could not have envisioned something that. Live truly is stranger than fiction.

I have been raised an atheist – my family was atheist for at least 3 generations. Maybe that is why it is so hard for me to grasp this.