Taurus The Bull

Should an artist be in love with their creations? Of course they should! It's crazy to not love what you're doing, or doing something you don't love, or doing anything at all without love, ever!

I love not because something is perfect and/or deserves to be loved. I'm not sure what that is, perhaps admiration or awe but to me, not love. Love is a different thing (to me) that has a strand of caring and understanding in it, compassion, delight at an existence that is quite unconditional. In this sense, I really love this design, Taurus, and enjoyed thoroughly interacting with it and making different things that feature the basic design.

So, I received a request for a symbol hybrid featuring Taurus The Bull. I like symbol hybrids because they are very magical and interesting to make; not quite at the same level as a pure symbol painting but in their own way, they do many things.

I started by looking at some pictures on the net and came across a beautiful design for a bull from bronze age Crete:

Seeing this did the trick and I drew my own Taurus design without further ado:

The laying of the lines is the most important part of making a symbol hybrid and that happens spontaneously on the canvas, as do the colour choices. My Taurus couldn't be anything other than gold and the related colors violet, blue, green and turquoise. As I was painting it over the next two days, I kept thinking that it would be nice to make this whole design out of gemstones at some point, different types of gold for the bull and different shades of jade, lapis lazuli, agate and malachite for his world.

Something that also came to me, as things do when you are working on a symbol painting, was the thought that in trading, the bull stands for a buoyant, successful market where great profits are being made; on many occasions, I also saw the bull of the North & Midnight, a traditional magick association. This all tallies with Taurus itself of course and that in turn takes us to the constellation of Taurus which contains the Plejades, Aldebaran and looks to Orion.

Here is the finished symbol hybrid painting Taurus The Bull:

It was handed over rather quickly as a Christmas present so I didn't have much of a chance to interact with it further or take a better picture; but thanks to the miracle of modern computer drawing tools, I could get over the disappearance of my Taurus by making the vector version.

Making vector images is tedious, but once you have them, now you are free to do all sorts of things with them. I made a golden bull version for my own amusement which may grace a T-Shirt or a mug in due course :-)

The physical painting is gone but the symbol of the golden bull and my personal "Taurus" is clearly still with me, and I'm very pleased with that, it must be said.

SFX

December 2010

Taurus by StarFields, December 2010

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