“The Resurrection Pod” 18x24 Oil on Panel 2025 “The Cactus Garden Series” 1/9

*Greetings Earthlings, here is the first painting in a new series that I am calling the “Cactus Garden”.

🌵 Here is an excerpt from the story: 

On Midsomer’s day, Master Gardner, Pinkney Dill, discovered the strangest cactus growing in his garden. Where had it come from? The strange cactus stood twenty tall and resembled a handsome many-armed saguaro, except there was clearly something large and gross wriggling inside. Pinkney grimaced and shook his head. The saguaro’s flowers gave off a vaguely metallic stink, and it had an odd vertical seam down the middle. The oddest thing about the towering writhing saurago was that it had not been there the day before. It must have sprouted up overnight. 

This painting is from my Summoner and Scribe series, which tells the story of Benjamin Tod Mortimer, a melancholy young lad who gives up on his dream of being an author of children’s tragedies to take a good-paying but unsatisfy job as a scribe for a Master Occultist…who specializes in the summoning of demons.

✨🌵When the Ancient Doom Lord, William-of-the-Wisp, was offered an opportunity to increase his frightening powers, he could hardly resist.

Benj had been commissioned to compose a grimoire of darkest necromancy, but instead, he decided to write a sad story. When the “grimore” was read aloud in a cemetery during a magickal operation, all of those in attendance were driven to tears by Benj’s woebegone tale--a tale about a heart surgeon for broken hearts.  Here we see the occultist releasing the young scribe to pursue a career in creative writing.      

Here we see Benj lamenting in a dungeon. But not all is lost! Through his encounters with the Occultist and his flock of diabolical creatures, the young scribe has learned a bit of magick himself….

In this painting, we see Master Occultist Erie Oldfather selling Benj’s most recently penned grimoire to Anya the Onion Witch and her associates: Matilda, the tortured ghost of a childhood friend, and the cannibal, Bloodmouth Scarman. Benj desperately wants to quit his new job, but he is in too deep.

Following his sister’s extraterrestrial abduction and his breakup with the desert sorceress, Orren Mawson found himself alone and lonely. He spent most of his days deep in caves questing for crystals and valuable minerals that he would later trade for horse food, friendship bracelets, and fruit pies. Unfortunately, Orren was friendless. Then one day, amongst the stalactites and bats in the fathomless below, deep within his discontent, Orren met someone luring in the darkness. It was a fellow miner.

Here, we see Benj walking home from another hard day of transforming the blasphemous ramblings of infernal summoned entities into elegant prose, portentous future predictions, dark spellcraft, and filthy jokes. But, despite the great pay and benefits his new employment offers, the young author longs to be writing his own stories, and feels crushed by the weight of his untapped creativity.