Mike emailed me a jpeg attachment featuring a piece of art work by Lior Arditi—“Time Trap.” The setting is a gloomy, hellish forest, limited to various shades of gray and black. In the foreground stand two demons holding scepters with serrated blades. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of similar demons in the background.
The central figure, part human, part frog, part alien, but mostly forearm and wrist to host all his watches, lives alone in the forest hell evidenced by his nearby hovel, a carved out hole in a tree full of watch gears.
Let me try to describe this central character, the watch fiend who is crouching to position himself toward an alluring watch—a watch that sits in the middle of the claws of a bear trap. The creature has pallid gray-blue skin no doubt forever covered by the forest’s canopy of darkness. He has oversized feet tapering to frog-like legs and an emaciated torso suggesting his forest environment, while abundant in watches, lacks basic nutrients.
In place of a human neck and head is a serpentine forearm attached to which is a huge hand made into a fist with the index finger and pinkie extended like devil horns. Three watches adorn the forearm-neck. The fiend also has human arms and hands, also adorned with watches. One of the human hands greedily hovers over the watch and it’s apparent we on the verge of seeing the creature snapped into the jaws of the trap.
My speculation is that the creature finds a way to free himself from these traps but only after cutting and maiming himself severely.
Most depressingly, he never learns his lesson. He is trapped in an intractable cycle of getting trapped and freeing himself, only to be trapped again, forever and ever.
(For a more detailed look, click on the image above)
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