Ellation Painting

E L L A T I O N Painting ©️ 2020 Keith Waller Narrative © 2020 Ross Clifford The year is 2025. Located high above the Crimean Peninsula and surrounded by the Black Sea— its vicious shiny eel like tongues lapping at its base, is the mediaeval fortressed city of Yalta. Founded by Greek conquerors in the dark ages as a safe harbour and fishing port. Yet this same city by 2025 is a far cry from its Byzantine splendour, for its palaces are in decay, its vines cobwebbed with dead dew hang from rusty stakes and its many twisted streets lead to crumbling facades: rundown abodes which shelter vagabonds and those of wretched countenance. It is a most tragic fact to relate, but all humankind by this time had digitised themselves into automatons, slaves of micro-technologies controlling their every thought and move. Any sense of a glorious past long since rinsed away with the rancid swill of the municipal laundromats and tabernas. _____ 2025 is the year that the hilltop prophet of Yalta, Diomedes, foretold of a massive meteorite the size of 50 football stadiums impacting the Tyrrhenian sea, causing inundation to every coastal city from Sapporo to Dakar. In his vision it causes a terrifying tsunami, washing away homesteads, upturning skyscrapers and bringing down power-networks. By the same blow, the internet is floored, computer mainframes around the world flicker off and die. People stare at black screens not in disbelief but in unknowing—waiting for command prompts from an invisible autocratic voice. Let us join the prophet as he looks up at the night sky on August 22nd—exactly one week before the prophesy. From the East a burning ember races nearer to his hilltop sanctuary … cicadas chirrup noisily, but other than the lapping waves below and the laughter of distant children the quiet is palpable, the air humid, electrical. Diomedes stares stoically at the shooting star, until golden light envelops him and he blacks out. _____ On the morning of Saturday 23rd there was no trace Diomedes had ever been taken, no clue to his whereabouts, and no one to care. A crow that landed on his cot cawed in the most graven way, but the sea still lapped below and the scent of wild garlic hung sickly in the air. The noise could only be described as a long drilling tone, penetrating his skull. A beam of violet light blinding him. There was no speech from the face but he heard their words clear enough in his head … ‘We are from 444BC, in the 20th year of Artaxerxes recorded in Babylonian scripture, we come to help you now disrupt your future’… Diomedes lay inert; his vine-veined hands limp either side of the inspection couch. From the corner of one awakening eye he glimpsed a metallic gown with a tiny serpent insignia standing out in lapis blue. ‘Apart from the imminent catastrophe about to befall your city, your human race is doomed on the brink of collapse and sublimation to teladroidal corruption; the humankind is being phased into its own self-made oblivion.’ See over > ‘Diomedes, I am Sylvanus’. The voice intoned. ‘You alone have been chosen as the catalyst to set a different course of action for Earth. Fear not—your people are encoded for this time … but we need your mind to link to them.’ Diomedes was led down a dimly lit corridor, something like the inside of a giant octopus tentacle, both wet and pustulated. Through an airlock into a magnificent gothic hall of barrelled vaults. At the far end of the hall sat a figure, feathered from head to toe in beautiful coloured plumage; all that could be observed of the face was a giant raptorial beak. Around the bird like creature were sabre limbed dancers who resembled more his own countrymen, gyrating in slow hysteria. ‘Welcome to Ella 5’ said the voice inside his head. ‘We have brought you to our space colony—a tiny cluster of stars on the edge of the Pleiades, because you have special insight. Your mind is capable of bridging the past with the future—plus your DNA is uncorrupted.’ ‘There are less than 60 seconds to save your earth from the meteorite Nada. But as you are aware this is just part of it, for the dividing of the worlds is about to take place. We as a race are not that different from how you used to be. We embody the spirit of native American shamanism and can shape shift at will. The power of our minds is still intact as your people’s are not … part of their re-initiation into the ways of superbeings is to denounce their A.I., and to reconnect to their animal souls which are wild, intuitive and free. And this is partly to be assisted from us through emissions of violet light which will activate their implants.’ Diomedes knew he wasn’t dreaming, as getting up from his cot he rushed to the window looking out over the flowering embankment of date plums and Mexican palms to the bay below. People were lining the promenade and shouting. The sky ablaze. Overhead a fireball was hurtling over the sea. There was a sonic boom and the palm tips instantaneously scorched black. {Remember, remember what Sylvanus had said} … He closed his eyes and watched in his mind the meteorite deflected. Simultaneously, rays of violet light flooded the mountain plateaus and radiated deep into the Bosphorus Strait. In the abyss of the moment, Dantesque images raced alongside Arcadian ones. In the turbulence caused by the blast of megaton energy, Diomedes was flung to the other side of the room, hitting his forehead on the stone table. Burned petals were strewn across the floor, the smell of sulphur dense, as a night later he crawled to his feathered feet, his grey eyes smouldering with fever and his head heavy. He expected to look out at a desolate black crater, a sky as glassy as ice and streaked with the ghosts of lightning rakes … but Yalta was not heaped in ashes; carmine red skies were not Yalta’s fate—nor the destiny of the World. It was now only time that would wait to see if history would yet again repeat these events, but for now the old demons were behind them, as they harvested the return to a pantheistic culture built on honouring the Earth, nature’s cycles and the elation of its mystic ways, and from the steppe high above the Black Sea an old man shared bread and borscht with anyone who cared listen to his wild imaginings and far-fetched tales. ....................................... The paintings take many months to evolve, with oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas the line, color, and composition slowly emerge to reveal the ghosts and dreams that surround us. “I write about and paint the ghosts and dreams that live in the cities of the world...they swim in our sea and fly through the clouds with stories to tell.” This picture is professionally framed in a recessed profile wood frame and ready for hanging with fitted framers cord to the reverse. The Voice of Space. Exclusive Saatchi Art Cigarettes glow In blank windows like coloured eyes All corners in the dark Keith Waller©2020 Copyright Keith Waller is an artist/designer with an unusual take on life that is reflected in his art, his career has been extraordinarily varied and anybody would be hard-pressed not to call him eclectic. He is probably best known for his creation of the Tesco logo and for his illustrations and abstract art. He was an illustrator for OZ magazine and contributor to The Tate Modern and Kunsthalle, Berlin galleries, Consumer Culture exhibition with Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. He became well known for his creation of short catchphrases for advertising such as “I never go anywhere without one” for Barclaycard, and ….. these later evolve into his well known Haiku lines on social media. Tagged as one of the greatest post-modernist painters his work exists in an apocalyptic world where only dreams and ghosts live on. He has a Degree in Art and Design from The University of Brighton, and has been exhibited internationally.

Painting:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:11 W x 8.7 H x 1.2 D in

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