Plenipotent Firebrand (version 5)

There are five different sources from which this image is derived. Two of those sources are my own hand drawn images, and the three others were images obtained from the internet. One of them is an image of vessels taken from a fluoroscopy, another one is a circular fiduciary marker, and the one you can see in the foreground–the blue and teal colored form–is actually a picture of the fire tornado that was recently seen in the California fires this year (2014).

I’d been considering how imprinting works in many different domains, physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. One comparison I’d recently read about is the type-writer ball. A type ball has the letters or characters of an alphabet on it, and spins accordingly to the correct character when a key is punched on the keyboard. That’s how typewriters from the 20th century were.

In many ways, people are like type characters in that they imprint the external world, and even their internal worlds, with their thoughts, feelings, actions, and energies. This image sort of looks like a type ball, or it can be compared to it at least. So many of the symbols represented in the selections combined in the creation of this picture seem to allude to an imprinted and imprinting soul.

The circle itself is a symbol of the self, as Carl Jung indicated in his research as a psychoanalyst. You can barely see the fiduciary marker coming through from the bottom layer here but it is basically the black and white colors you see coming through all the cracks . Fiduciary markers are used to mark locations in the body before a patient undergoes surgery for a certain procedure in his or her body, thus an imprinting is done to accomplish this.

The words I chose to title this piece indicate a character who has full authority to brand his or her world with fire. Branding with fire used to be done by ranchers in order to mark their cattle with a distinct character so as to distinguish one rancher’s cattle from another’s. I reversed the colors on the fire tornado–which you can see in the foreground on the lower right of this picture–so that the colors are different hues of blue. Normally, yellow, orange, and red are associated with fires, but natural gas can be blue when it’s emitted as a flame from a stove for example.

There is enough yellow and red anyway characterizing the picture that it easily communicates a sense of heat; a heat we are all experiencing this Spring and Summer.