{"id":1179,"date":"2009-04-20T07:42:07","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T15:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=1179"},"modified":"2009-04-20T08:42:33","modified_gmt":"2009-04-20T16:42:33","slug":"garden-painting-for-jim-and-the-flims","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/04\/20\/garden-painting-for-jim-and-the-flims\/","title":{"rendered":"Garden Painting for “Jim and the Flims”"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>
\n \u201cThe Baby Garden.\u201d\u009d Acrylic on canvas. 24″ by 18″. April, 2009. Click the picture to see a slightly larger image. More info at my paintings page<\/a>.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

For the last month or so of working on Jim and the Flims, <\/em>I\u2019ve been nibbling away at a painting of how it\u2019s gonna look when Jim and his new ghost girlfriend Ginnie make it over to the other side, that is, the land of Flimsy, which is both a parallel world with its own natives, as well as being a place where the spirits of some people from our world go after death (as newly decided in the previous post, and thanks again, by the way, for all the supportive comments).<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve mentioned before, these days, when I\u2019m stuck for story images, I like to paint instead of just thinking. I\u2019ve always done little drawings of my scenes before writing them, but now I enjoy the more heavy-duty process of breaking out my kit of acrylic paints. The painting takes longer, and I get more deeply into it than into a drawing.<\/p>\n

My inspiration for the motif (art term for the subject of a painting) was van Gogh\u2019s The Sower<\/a><\/em>\u2014a man sowing seeds into a field. In my story the sower’s name is Monin. And I\u2019ve got two people greeting him, they just came out of that interdimensional tunnel visible in the door of a house that’s a limp Brussels Atomium made of lavender spheres. These two are Jim and Ginnie.<\/p>\n

The kicker in the picture is that the sower is casting baby-seeds into the field, and we see human heads\u2014and the head of one green alien\u2014sprouting up. I probably won\u2019t have the green alien in this scene in the novel, nor do Jim and Ginnie necessarily look exactly like this\u2014my book paintings are more like dreams or premonitions about my stories than being totally accurate illustrations.<\/p>\n


\n[The helpful, prancing dog of the right brain retrieves the ball. Arf!<\/em>]<\/p>\n

In the morning the seeds in the garden will have grown\u2014they\u2019ll be human-like bodies, with their legs rooted in the ground, and with no intelligence, like blank-slate clones. All of them look like copies of Monin, the sower. Some jivas <\/a>come and sting the bodies, implanting larvae. The jiva larvae eat up the bodies and burst forth as new jivas.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the practical reason why I need this garden, see. I want the jivas to be savage parasitic flesh-eaters\u2014like wasps who lay their eggs in the flesh of paralyzed hosts (I love the use of the word \u201chost\u201d\u009d in this context). But I don\u2019t want the jivas\u2019 flesh-eating to be a problem for the locals in Flimsy, so we have these \u201cjiva gardens\u201d\u009d full of clones for the jivas to grow inside of.<\/p>\n

And later, Jim can grow a clone of his own body, and put a yuel inside the clone\u2019s skull to produce a zombie fake Jim who can perhaps join the merry roller-derby surf zombies of Santa Cruz…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Baby Garden.\u201d\u009d Acrylic on canvas. 24″ by 18″. April, 2009. Click the picture to see a slightly larger image. More info at my paintings page. For the last month or so of working on Jim and the Flims, I\u2019ve been nibbling away at a painting of how it\u2019s gonna look when Jim and his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1179"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1181,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179\/revisions\/1181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}