The Galleries – Two New Sacred “Texts”

There have been several changes these last few weeks, which I happily look upon as the
healthy evolution of the site. One lovely little addition is the creation of a Wallpapers
page to make available free downloads of Sacred Antinous iconography. The inaugural trio
is, I think, quite smart-looking, and I’m looking forward to releasing more as time goes
on.

That being said, there’s a much more significant addition to the site, which is the
creation of two galleries (with a third one on the way) that, taken together, represent the
visual arts component of the Sacred Texts. (As a side-note, given that these galleries
are to be populated with works mainly done by myself, I decided to remove the call for
illustrators.)

The first gallery is one in which I’ll be assembling all the “Frescoes” that I’m in the
process of making — most of them illustrations of the Epistles of Antinous. My fictional
vision for The Bathhouse Frescoes is that they were “discovered” on some glorious archaeological dig
– most romantically, of course, in Antinoopolis — in the miraculously-preserved remains
of a bathhouse. As far as their erotic and explicit content, I’m taking my cue from John
Clarke’s twin books, Looking and Lovemakng and Roman Sex — both of which feature
explicit bathhouse sex scenes done in fresco.

The second gallery, which is one I hinted at many moons ago, is The Gospel of Vitalis.
This one will be assembling the collected drawings of Vitalis, a relatively easy
narrative accomplishment as they were mostly kept safe in the stables by Anaxamenos. I
envision these as fairly casual pen & ink drawings, which is a style that will allow me
to create a bit more loosely than the frescoes, and far more loosely than the mosaics.

Which brings me to the third gallery, which is not yet launched, but will likely be
called The Temple Mosaics. As the Antinous and Hadrian mosaics have proven to be such
successful pieces (see my personal website for the pic of the two lovers staring at each
other across my living room wall), and as I have ambitious plans to actually integrate
them into my staged performances one day, it occurred to me that other Sacred Texts
deserve mosaics of their own, and so I’ve set out for myself a program of work in which
I’ll be creating iconic mosaic imagery for each of the Texts that I post to the web (or
produce to the stage). Naturally, this will probably take a rather long time, but that’s
never been a problem for me before. Besides, I don’t imagine most of the other mosaics
will be quite so ambitious as the first two.

Otherwise, both the site and its audience continues to grow, and I am steadily plugging
away at getting more and more good content off the ground. I’m also happy to report that
the inaugural performance is looming: I’ve been talking to actors and have already booked
a small space to get the first collection of Sacred Texts onto their feet. If all goes
well, the performance will take place in mid-November, here in Toronto. More news on this
front coming soon…