Trophic Eggs Final Day

trophic egg – (n.) a rejected egg, usually degenerate in form and inviable, that is fed to other members of an ant colony

The Trophic Eggs collection of drawings was inspired by resurrected thoughts and ideas that I had previously rejected as nonsense. It is easy for me to dismiss my good ideas because they are mine. Then when a stranger expresses what I had felt, I recognize my own rejected thoughts in their work and it all comes back to me with an alienated twist, and I am forced to take, with regret, my own opinions and ideas from another. So, for Trophic Eggs, I set out to put down on paper some of those once rejected, inviable ideas to find out if any nutritional value could be squeezed from them.

Insects have again made their ubiquity apparent in these works, as they had in my previous collection, Letters From Desolation Row. Bugs fascinate me. Among other subject matter, these drawings include some of my interpretations of my experiences living with insects and other small creatures… How they look, how they feel, how they make me feel, how they taste, how they feel crawling through your hair. (You have something in your hair!)

My drawings all begin in pencil, graphite, and colored pencil. Then I refine them by cross-hatching with a ballpoint pen. If the composition calls for a large area of value, I use acrylic paint. Every piece begins as an egg of an idea to be hatched and grown out on the paper. As I work, a blob and a couple of squiggly lines help to get the overall composition to emerge, then they slowly begin to turn into a gallbladder, a foreleg, a chine, a river, etc. The more absurd the final result appears, the more I love looking at it. I take absurdity very seriously.

-Mark Loughney

“If you can master nonsense as well as you have learned to master sense, then each will expose the other for what it is: absurdity. From that moment of illumination, a man begins to be free regardless of his surroundings. He becomes free to play order games and change them at will. He becomes free to play disorder games just for the hell of it. He becomes free to play neither or both. And as the master of his own games, he plays without fear, and therefore without frustration, and therefore with good will in his soul and love in his being. And when men become free, then mankind will be free.”

-Malaclypse The Younger