Rosetta Stoned

Artist: Lloyd Harvey
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Rosetta Stoned

Medium: Acrylic Paint on Acrylic Paper
Size: 10” x 14”
Description:

Based on the eighth song from the Tool album 10,000 Days, Rosetta Stoned was a joy to work on. This was a preliminary painting for a the bigger version.

The 8th song on Tool’s 10,000 Days, Rosetta Stoned, tells the story of an estranged loner who tells the tale of how he was abducted by aliens and told how the world will end. As the story progresses, the central protagonist reveals that he doesn’t remember the message and as such, is considered insane.

Interestingly enough, one possible meaning behind the song is that the abduction never happened and the central figure did, in fact, have a ‘trip’ on DMT, a hallucinogenic drug known to cause alien abduction hallucinations. So, how you choose to look at it is down to you.

For my piece, I knew that I wanted to paint the alien. The orb that the creature is holding is what he shows to the loner where, inside, it reveals the secret of how the world ends. Of course, even if such a being could show a person how the world was to end, we as a race would never really understand what it was saying anyway. Its terms of reference would be, for better a word to describe it, alien and thus we wouldn’t be able to gather any understanding to it.

Its a little like this: my two friends who play guitar often talk about pick ups and line outs and the such and as a drummer, these sorts of terms mean very little to me and so I don’t understand what they are talking about. Now imagine that a creature from another world had something it wanted to show you. This is in fact another possible meaning to the song itself. The abduction happened, the man just didn’t understand what the creature said.

Contact me at lloydharvey[at]shrunkenheaddesign.co.uk
www.shrunkenheaddesign.co.uk

To view the full meaning behind this piece, click here