This is one of the few instances where a piece of my artwork is directly inspired by real world events. Normally, I can't be bothered to pay attention to the real world, no matter what it does to get my attention, but I saw a story in the newspaper a few weeks ago that genuinely upset me.
It turns out that, in caves all over the U.S. and Canada, a fungal infection has been killing entire cave-fulls of bats. And when you consider that the bat population in a cave can be in the hundreds or thousands or more, that's a lot of tiny little lives lost. This is devastating. Bats are an essential part of our ecosystem, and nothing is being done to prevent this catastrophe. It would seem like a simple fungicide spray would be enough to fix this, but I have no idea if this has even been attempted. It's quite sad.
Anyhow, this piece is actually a part of my Lovecraftian horror collection. As soon as I heard it was fungus that was going all this killing, I thought instantly of the many fungal mythos horrors. I imagined that this fungus was some spore of an otherworldly creature, spawned around and unholy alter that predates man. This alter, deep in the depth of a bat-infested cavern, began spawning its horrible, interstellar spores, which bled into the water of the cavern. As time wore on, many of the caves' more robust creatures adapted to the presence of the toxic mold. While many perished, consumed from within by the cancerous mold, others thrived. One genus of bat in particular, a cousin of the common brown bat, was able to form an almost symbiotic relationshop with the fungus, and used it to grow, and flourish. Nor, after generations of breedings and eons of exposure to the alien blight generated by the inhuman artifact, a single specimen, the perfect hybrid of bat and spore, has emerged into the night, ready to spread its spore into a new world.
I'll be doing a little bit of photoshop coloring on this piece. I'm thinking a simple sepia-toned of B&W color job, to fit with the subject matter. We'll see.
