#pieter

I re-worked some more Smurfs 2025 movie-original characters.

This one was tough, there’s a lot more changes this time. The best angle I thought to go with was recycling some of the original concepts for The Lost Village.

Ron and Ken are a little older than Pieter (Papa Smurf), but when they were kids they called their tight-knit group “the Guardianeers of Good,” hoping to make the Cursed Land a better place for all creatures.

Pieter recently arrived in the land of Oz a year ago, popping up hungry for new contraptions and designs the likes he could test. They searched tirelessly for an automaton called 'Tik-tok'. Unfortunately there were next to no clues and every scholar was oblivious. When her efforts finally proved useless, Pieter turned her attention to what was available in the Emerald City... Which was equally in vain. It was all the same design and the same tricks, not a single lick of creativity anywhere they looked. With tinted lenses Pieter explored deeper into the land of Oz. Somewhere in Munchkin Country, they came across a seemingly abandoned house that when he ventured further into, was wrecked and shattered by some sort of explosion which piqued their interest immediately. Now it's usually bad to break and enter than to live in someone's house- This is a different case though! The house was a treasure trove of a tinker's nonsensical notes and designs that were obviously impossible to carry out. There was one particular machine that endeared Pieter; a machine in the center of chaos. Webs of cracks across walls and flash burnt furniture all spiraled into this single object. What was it for? How did it work? What happened? Pieter mulled over and over, looking at the same matrix of cogs and springs hoping for some sort of clue- then back to salvageable notebooks strewn about the messy floor. This is exactly what Pieter was searching for.

more info/doodles

Tempera on canvas, lots of suffering and joy

That was a whole new experience for me: I did a few canvas before, but never used tempera before and never tried to mimic something as beautiful as old paintings (I failed there, I know))).

'The Girl With The Pearl Earring' never was my fave movie (I don't like the movies about artists in general, it's just not my cup of tea), but admiring the golden haired Cillian Murphy hit me hard. I looked at this beautiful face and thought: why couldn't this be an inspiration for an artist?

I wanted to imagine what would it be to make a portrait of Pieter. How horrified the boy would be at first. But how he would wear his best suit – the one he used to wear in church, with those small shiny buttons...

One thing that kinda blows my mind reading through Dune is how both movies have given us radically different portrayals of Baron Harkonnen and how both of them are totally believable in the context of the original text. If you’re not familiar, the new sexy Dune gives us this raspy Kingpin type Baron that wades around in a bunch of unsettling fluids with this villainous gravitas like a fascist hippopotamus. In David Lynch’s 1984 Dune we are still dealing with a caricature of obese evil, but he’s just so goddamn jolly about it. He’s giggling and spitting and cavorting around in antigravity while Games Workshop writers take note about how everyone loves his boils. These depictions are so opposite to each other that seeing them both in the text is giving me this weird double vision.

I think the reason is this beautiful context we don’t really see in either version of the film, and that is the psychopath mentat Pieter DeVries serving absolute cunt with his exposition. It’s a worldbuilding thing. The Baron has a 15 year old Feyd-Rautha watching his uncle to learn a thing or two about statecraft. Pieter is a twisted mentat, which is like a human computer with an OS optimized for human rights violations and he is just having none of the Baron’s shit. He flaunts his expensive drug addiction, offers to dance, and repeatedly reminds the Baron that he was too stupid to have come up with this Snidely Whiplash shit by himself. Pieter correctly reasons that the Baron will have him dead as soon as he has outlived his usefulness and that his attitude isn’t going to be much of a determining factor. For now he is very confident that he remains useful.

So eventually Feyd is like ‘Uncle, I’m just watching you argue, I could be playing GameBoy right now’ because GameBoy is what Feyd-Rautha calls the guy with needles for teeth that he hunts through the steam tunnels. And the Baron goes ‘Ah, but you are learning something. See, one of the great things we lost during the robot jihad were Excel spreadsheets that weren’t little bitches.’ And that’s where it gets me. I can’t tell if this is an impatient mastermind flexing his general obesity or a plague-clown who invited his sassy laptop in to make everyone watch his sick burn. Maybe those aren't mutually exclusive. Maybe it’s not that weird and it’s just David Lynch brain poison leaving its indeliable mark.