This is Uriel, one of the seven Archangels from the prior-to and early post-exile, second-temple Hebrew period, and as listed in the book of Enoch. Archangels were one of many culturally-enriching gifts given to the Hebrews during their 70 year, more or less, stay in Babylon, stories all much older that any hebrew text.

In anticipation of the beginning of this project, the idea of having a sitting with each of these seven truly gender-fluid, non-binary, non-physical, mental-constructs had me procrastinating a bit. To address doing representative portraits of something that ultimately has no appearance, like angels and demons and suchstuff, would normally have us look to movies, or Renaissance and Romantic paintings, for reference, and just do what’s been done before, but I couldn’t do this. I needed to go to the source.

Anyway, that’s enough of the realism.

I needed an image of these beasts, something to paint, so in the customary ways of summoning, I summoned. Simple as that, and there is no better way. Also, knowing that any expectation can have profound influence on result, the only way to address this kind of shit is clearly and specifically, but with serious abandon and without trepidation.

So, to shorten a story that could easily be way too long-winded, I’ll say that from there, from the summoning, comes a ongoing morphing visual overlay of sorts, this as a direct result of asking for your experience be within the frontier of understanding, by asking oneself just what it is one is “seeing” before them, and negotiating with that thought-form. One always has to demand, “Dude, make your form understandable to me.”

It takes a momentary lapse of reason to get to this, this, this uhh… place of understanding, which seems to be contrary to the specific nature of reason as applied to understanding, but yeah, its a mental inversion of sorts, a willing but disciplined, short-term madness.

They came to me sequentially. An hour passed and I was ready to draw, sketching in color, and quickly to preserve. These forms are pushed, birthed even, into the near-physical mental realm. The results came from there, and in this case all seven paintings came with one consistency worth mentioning, and that was the unfamiliarity that these entities had with the nature of a “smile for the camera” culture. But they did, indeed try. This painting, as do all seven, has Uriel sporting the best smile possible given the circumstances!

This is when Eddie, reclining up to his neck, shakes his head and says, “Is it always like this?”

We were just hanging around Terry’s live-in garage up Golden Hills way, when Eddie suddenly, but slowly, gets up from the couch. Now Eddie Lucero, this dude had creds. He went from Vato to hardcore punk, and from hardcore punk to goth – he was a serious cultural street vet. The dude did what he wanted. We all talk like we do what we want, but do we really do that? I mean, who really does that? Who is really that honest with themselves? People just don’t do that, you know, pivot like that, at least not so willingly as Eddie did. But, Eddie did, plus his mother made the best tamales in town, so we’d all vowed to always be there for the dude! Why dis him? Loads respect, eh?

Anyway, Eddie just gets up, rubs his eyes deeply, and his already overly made-up mascara and eyeliner becomes a deeper mess than before. He looks at, studies,  his now blackened hands, shakes his head, and decides to rub his hands clean in his already blackened hair, repurposing the old for another day. From there he heads to the door, droning in his best Robert Smith voice, “Laughing into the fire, IS IT ALWAYS LIKE THIS?”

We followed quickly, thinking he’d be going home for some of mom’s fresh, deep-steamed, tamales!