Raven of the Deep End

To define a thing is to freeze it in time and forbid it from growing. Still, you wanted a story about the painting?... more

by Mandem

Title

Raven of the Deep End

Artist

Mandem

Medium

Painting

Description

To define a thing is to freeze it in time and forbid it from growing. Still, you wanted a story about the painting?

Well then: this is portrait of the character Raven (played by Christina Bennington) from Jim Steinman's hit West End musical, "Bat Out Of Hell," a retrofuturist retelling of the Peter Pan myth.

Raven is the daughter of the despotic CEO of Falco Industries, imprisoned in her own home by the impetuous man who controls the remnants of humanity on a now-sealocked stretch of Old Manhattan. She flees Falco Tower and her abusive father to join forces with the Lost (a wild pack of escaped experimental subjects whose bodies have been "frozen" in perpetual childhood) and a charismatic singer named Strat. From the towers of the rich to the flooded tunnel-ruins of the Deep End, Strat and Raven fight to find love, release, and a song to make sense of wasted youth at the end of the world.

But every happy ending signals the arrival of a new post-future. This retrofuturist "New Old Master" style painting imagines Raven years after the musical's bombastic finish... Perhaps she found herself in the arms of her lover, in the rhythm of the rock'n'roll, in the long rebellion against the corporatocracy. But if she knows definitively at last who she is... can she still be called Lost?

Uploaded

September 6th, 2017