Space X Launches

My favorite bit is the cows 1:36 -- 1:44 in case the clip below doesn't display.

Because I want to paint that picture so badly but I see it cannot work as composition. Too much negative space. A similar picture totally got me already so hard that I chiseled and painted it for myself, my first art for my new apartment, then somebody saw it framed and hanging and bought it. I can't complain. They respect it and present it quite nicely. The high-rise apartment where it is now is large with two balconies but there is no clue to that upon entry. Although high up there, it is very much like entering an artificially lit tomb at first. The visitor is presented with a short narrow hall that forces a right turn to another hallway where this painting is hanging along with another of mine on the wall that separates the tomb-like hall from all life up in the clouds. That other painting is larger, a woman with luxurious hair reclining and holding an ankh at her knee. 

The direction of the cows help herd people to the right although there is no other way to go. 

The bas relief of the cows is famously titled, "cattle fording a canal" It is a tiny part of pharaoh Ti's tomb, the composition cut off by a doorway. The vignette itself is famous and repeated in other ancient tombs. A terrified calf is being carried across and calling to its mother in a group of three cows behind. One cow in the group is drinking the water they're crossing, the middle cow is calling ahead to her calf, and a third is being blissfully led by a second herder. There is a less interesting group of bulls behind the group of cows. The zig zag water pattern is tediously etched into plaster, that is most of the work, and it distorts the coloration of the figure's legs in the water.

This is a copy of the photograph from a book that I used for my own replication. If you click on the link you can see how the color in the original 4,500 year old piece has become even worse since this photograph was taken. Now that I see it again, I still really like it. I imagine it now with a rocket. 

Possibly up there with the hieroglyphics. These hieroglyphics look so old and nearly random without long horizontal register lines. I could break the rules and have the rocket cross over registers that aren't there and further blend text and illustration.

The two hieroglyphic bulls in the upper left above the horns of the bull group in the art below them show very nicely how text and art blur. An hieroglyphic bull represents the concept and the sound "ka," a portion of spirit, but not here, and the tall pyramid delta sign near them means "gives" sometimes shown being held in a human hand, it is part of royal offering formulation. So those bulls up there must not mean "ka" but rather mean actual bulls. We can expect the text to be bragging about how many head of cattle the king made as offering. This type of vignette of workers, the  text between the cows could be identifying the herder by name and could be what he is saying, as a cartoon, in this case, though, the text directs the viewer's attention (in a tomb!) to the artistic detail, "a calf calls out to it's mother."