Friday, February 22, 2008

From the same series: Lapidary

2 comments:

Carla said...

LAPIDARY
The Lapidary was discovered
in the sixteenth century by a man
being pursued by a wild woman
through a Shennongjia forest. After a day’s
chase she caught him and attempted to mate.
Before she could succeed, the man pinned her
down and, fearing for his life, cut her open.
To his surprise, he found a tiny jade tablet
inside with inscriptions written upon it, and
brought the tablet to his local magistrate. The
tablet was formed by the Lapidary, an organ in the body responsible for creating hard surfaces. The nature
of the concretions produced depends on age, sex, and emotional state: calm people typically produce
thin, papery, or reedy surfaces, while passionate states are known to produce harder substances like glass or
jade. In the course of a lifetime these stones usually break up and are expelled from the body as a matter of course,
but it is possible to cut open the body and extract
the tablet inside. In some creatures, illness
deforms the Lapidary and creates
bezoars and snakestones,
prized by doctors.

Carla said...

The pigments on this one are entirely dirt- and stone-based oils.