Making Angels, When an Art gif Becomes a Virtual Icon for Contemplation
Archangel Michael, aka Saint Michael
Saint Michael (Sf. Mihai) aka Archangel Michael was mentioned to me in particular by an ex-cop turned Santeria Priest named Rob at a Botanica about 20 years ago. Since then I’ve had a keen interest in learning more about this leader of the other archangels. My interest developed over time and I started to make some drawings of him and other angels. Then last year, created my first gif with this being. At first, it didn’t occur to me that this might be a modern icon.
Icons were often created for contemplation, for people to get closer to a higher being or simply to get outside of themselves. Now a gif, it isn’t a piece of wood with an image to behold but it still serves the same purpose to me. What if the gif can bring you to a relaxed meditative state?
Making art that depicted angelic beings wasn’t something that was part of my practice initially. In fact, I never considered myself an ‘angel’ person and was quite unenthusiastic with people who publicly talked about angels and wore little angel pins. Angels were in my mind, associated with organised religion and my love affair with organised religion ended abruptly at the age of 10 or 11 when I had my first public disagreement with a religious leader who claimed that animals did not have souls. So, even though my aversion is to organised religion, it never meant that I had disdain for angelic beings or any beings for that matter, just didn’t think they were something to talk about with other people.
Michael is probably the most well known of the archangels and archangel Michael is a warrior. Personally, I have often identified with the warrior archetype, so that’s how my interest started.
In the past, some sketches made of him had a more modern interpretation as the image shown above, but recently when making the artwork featured in this article, looked at a historical reference.
The new media work shown in the gif is a derivative of the following mixed media work, paint and pastels on black paper. It is based on my memories of various images of him, which I never felt were quite right and in particular, this image as shown above of a mosaic was referenced. You can see clearly that the positioning of the head was referenced. In my version he is obviously quite different, it is a close-up and he wears chainmail.
Oddly, the outcome, as it so happens at times, is still not really what I expected. My feelings about the work on paper with traditional mediums are mixed. Yet that was the impetus for me to start to experiment with the work digitally. The digital manipulations were produced through the use of various software filters on GIMP (GIMP is free software that is very sophisticated and much like photoshop) and in addition the google deep dream algorithm, which is essentially filters and made 2 gifs from the original drawing and resulting images.
The mixed media work of Archangel Michael was filtered through deep dream using a medieval artwork of Saint Martha and the Tarasque.
The mixed media work shown below clearly emulates the Medieval style from the illuminated manuscript of Saint Martha and the Dragon.
Then a series of of images were created using various filters. Some were chosen, others destroyed and they were edited again with GIMP. Two of the finished new media works became prints in physical reality.
Others were simply included in gifs that were created below.
The first gif shown at the beginning of the article is actually the 2nd gif that I created and is much more transformative and goes through a series of derivative images, whereas the second gif shown below that is much simpler and cycles through some variations from the deep dream filter in particular.
What do you think about new media in the virtual world? Let me know in the comments and thank you for taking the time to read about the new media icon and art.
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About The Author
Amy Adams is a fine artist (MFA Painting — Academia de Arte Vizuale Ion Andreescu) living and working out of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She is passionate about the visual arts and music.
You can connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and her website.
A brief version of this article was originally published on my art blog on September 4, 2016.
