Countermagic
1. Countermagic is the name of this etching and also of the album by Nym I’ve been listening to up and down last week while working on this and other etchings. I hadn’t heard this marvellous, strangely satisfying word for a while and I still keep turning it around in my head. Aside from witch tales, the term “magic” now is mostly (and I’m also guilty of that) used and possibly misused to describe something wonderful.
When I was a child, I did not associate the term magic first with something wonderful (it was that scary element which made the word fascinating), as an adult, I definitely do. Now, when something is called “magic”, we know it must be amazing and we generally don’t associate it with something scary. It has lost its ambiguity to an extend that now it’s even used to sell things.
And so I like how the term countermagic breaks and expands this narrow meaning of “magic” how we use it today and brings it back to its full force and its wholeness, which contains good but also evil, light but also darkness. And funnily enough, in this sense, the term “countermagic” becomes countermagic to the term “magic” in the sense of the narrowed concept the latter has become.
2. A while ago in the little Spanish village I live I was waiting for the traffic light to turn green and on the other side of the street there was an old lady waiting. She was holding two terriers on a leash, one standing in front of the other and blocking my view to the second one until that one stuck out his head, so that from my perspective for a short (and magic, here we go!) moment it looked like a two-headed terrier, and that was the inspiration for that two-headed creature in this etching.
Countermagic is available in my shop
