HANDPOKED FUTHARK
October 15, 2021HANDPOKE
April 19, 2021
Art is the way that every people has of representing the world.
The knotwork that characterize Viking art are what our ancestors saw and lived, inside the knots we can still perceive their magic, because this came to them from the wildest nature and touches intrinsic strings to each of us.
I am spending all the time at my disposal trying to understand this language and its grammar, made up of rigid rules that moderate and harmonize the flow of the knots with its above and below and the extreme freedom to interpret its curves.
This is where I look for the heritage of our ancestors, convinced that this is the language by which they wanted to speak to us.
In this tattoo my goal was to produce true and original Viking art, stripped of fantasy, modern reinterpretations or whatever.
The subject is the mythological crow Muninn, memory of Óðinn, placed between the roots of Yggdrasill, the cosmic ash, the sacred tree that holds the world.
In drawing the raven I took as a reference the construction of the Mammen-style beasts, with particular attention to the decorations on the caskets of Cammin and Bamberg. For the decoration that constitutes the tree I have instead exploited some ideas found in the decoration of one of the faces of the ax head which gives its name to the Mammen style, in doing so I modeled the intertwining between the bird and the plant decoration following a strictly pattern based on the rules that have come down to us from archaeological finds but which is also unique and original.
You can see a short video of the making of this drawing and some of the archaeological references I used.
The fantastic music you hear is from Heilung.
