Hello, Year Of The Dragon
Dragon, Ubud, Bali
There are symbols that repeat themselves, the cycle in, return, vanish and reappear in other places—and symbolic language, as in the earlier blogs on brand archetypes.
Isn’t it so that there are devices, objects,
that repetitively reveal themselves—
during the course of your journey, your work?
These are marks that come back to you, your journeys
down the lane of the way that you have made, your pathways— and there they are again: they show up.
Literally—they show. Up.
They present themselves—
and they’re there for you.
To see.
Like dragons—something that keeps shows up as a patterned symbol in my life.
Looking at the nature of the migration of symbology, symbolic patterning—
I think about it as a poetic allegory: a garland of flowers—and they open up as you pass by them.
It’s up to you to see them.
You might not notice them in the beginning, but they come back and, hopefully, you’ll spend a moment to observe them. They’re telling you a story—there’s a teaching there. That patterning means some thing in the nature of one’s personal practice, and how you come back to a visual and metaphorical rendering that teaches you something,
and it repeats itself for further examination. You’re meant to see it—it’s telling you something.
For me—a patterning:
that’s something to the reckoning of dragons, that, one, began decades ago in a giant piece of glass art that was a baked sheath of rubine silica that was intricately cut, engraved and marked, then sheathed in a matrix of adhesive frisket. This was a piece of 4’x 8’ sheet of red-skinned, cladded glass. So big that I never photographed it.
And it broke, since I etched and sand-blasted it so deeply, to cut through the baked glass red skin and the blasting cleaved through—weakening the structure of the glass overall. And it cracked—so I gave bits of it away, ornate little bits of colored red glass and and filigreed, frisket-cut white light tracery.
Now, these pieces, given as gifts, are broadly disseminated—who knows where they all are now?
And it all comes back to the patterning, perhaps it began here: Dragon Warrior, during our Nintendo AOR years.
That grand dragon—and the work that went into it—that became the first in a patterning. Then, later, another dragon appeared—decades later, but a ripple from the first—GuildWars 2.
That legacy continues to grow—explore more here.
And that dragon,
there’s a story inside the story
told there, as well.
The symbol returns: I went on to other bits of dragon lore—
I worked on the Godzillas—
from copywriting, “size does matter,”
to identity studies for others.
A referential study—and a GIRVIN submission to WB,
as a historical play:
And later, dragons again, another brand storytelling, motion picture identity development—this time, for Beowulf—yet another embedded rendering for Robert Zemeckis and Paramount Studios:
the bejeweled dragon, as below:
And recently, in the legacy of dragons—Raya, worked on that for Disney iteratively, during the evolutions of that project.
And yes, Raya, as the reader likely knows,
there’s another dragon.
But if you could go further into
the heart of the dragon, in ancient legends and archetypes—
which symbolizes the guardian, the gatekeeper and the lord of the chthonic, another dragon came into my life—a Chinese vase;
then another—from a jaunt in Tibet.
Then, finally, in another tier of dragonology, my brush drawing which becomes carved steel, in a collaboration with a friend, Matt Adams—the Master of the works at RedSoul and—another collaboratrix—a long-running friend and client, now living in Birmingham, Michigan. This dragon shall be installed in her floor—as shown below.
That started with thinking, in a winding turn and movement through the space—roughly 8’ long and 4’ across—how could any string of metaphors and steel-installed
allegories find a place in this house?
What symbol could live there?
What could emblematically “stand guard, symbolize or captivate visitors to the home?” We looked at different sketched symbols, allegories of her—dreams and placemaking.
Sketched ideas—drawn with brushes and felted tools—each to fill the place, with a design element that fits the space.
And settled on the five-taloned dragon.
I brush-drew this
on handmade washi, Japanese handmade paper,
to precisely fit the space—
a curve around a 4’ x 8’ floor layout.
First, a trial, arc-incised
in a smaller sheet of steel.
Then a full size rendering,
arc-cut from a full sheet of steel—4’ across x 8’ high.
ArcLight at RedSoul.
Dragon makes dragon, RedSoul.
The five talons—a Chinese Imperial symbol of power.
Then pulling the plate for incision markings,
to explicate the character of the brush story.
The master dragon emplacement and the smaller-sized trial cuttings at RedSoul.
Matt worked out the sinews of incised grinding and polishing based on the movements of the drawing and brush renderings—we marked up the steel, and he ground-out the musculature and scale work—the sensate tactility of the dragon plate.
The dragon grinding lines.
The black markings below play to structure,
referenced for grinding details.
A flourish of colored reflections from the neon and other lighting sources in the industrial workshop.
Dragon’s head: the carved modeling of the 1/4” steel.
The final dragon, which supporting attachment bolts, for shipment.
Boxed-up. And hello to Birmingham, MI.
The install.
Tim Girvin | GIRVIN | Seattle Waterfront
The metaphor, the allegories | symbolism in design
Osean Studios | Tim Girvin Fonts