Duskform Calliope/The Realm I Razed My Heart In by Thomas Derksen-Tesser

Thomas Derksen-Tesser's Instagram

Based in Toronto, Canada

Duskform Calliope/The Realm I Razed My Heart In, Acrylic on Canvas, 2023, 11x14

In the midsummer of 2023, I found a perfectly intact Pale Beauty Moth that had seemingly just passed away. I named her Calliope. I put her in a small box with grass for protection. Although I got her home safe, in the last steps of a poorly planned attempt at preservation, I made mistakes that caused significant damage. I was absolutely devastated. It felt like committing a crime by breaking such a graceful thing. It actually caused me to spiral pretty hard over the next while. That September, I was walking in the woods, and an image popped into my head: a warped creature with armour-like skin crawling from a dark room, slightly visible by the light of a nearby window, half hidden behind a nearby fridge or cabinet. Right as it happened, I knew that creature was a bad omen, a harbinger of bad things. I knew it needed to be painted.

When I was a young lad, I instantly fell in love with search-and-find books such as I Spy or Can You See What I See? by Walter Wick, and Where's Waldo? or The Big Book of Search and Find by Tony Tallarico (really, anything that Tallarico created, and he did a lot). By populating an empty scene with so many different, odd characters and strange objects, and through intricate visual storytelling, Wick, Tallarico, and others demanded a high level of focus and dedication from the viewer. Similarly, I urge the viewer to continue looking, as there could be clues that reveal the meaning of the piece wholly.

To me, dreams are the most important thing in life. This piece, in particular, aims to blur the lines between the subconscious and the conscious, the dream and waking life. In a particular dream, I was walking in ankle-deep crystal water, white trees on small sandy islands as far as I could see. They were all the same height and perfectly spaced, so it felt like a crop field on a distant planet. It can be seen represented in the window. The moth in the middle is what I'd like to imagine Calliope looks like now... her duskform. The painting on the upper left and the various plants are meant to introduce a bit of colour balance alongside the reddish wood. The glass sphere is a nod to the masterpiece Salvator Mundi, by Leonardo da Vinci. The small plant beside it and the woman in the very back represent introspection or something similar, but the woman glares at you from a reflection of her true self, a disguise. As mentioned, the crawling creature is a harbinger of impending doom: addiction, turmoil, and regret, all of which began to set in over the months I took to get through this painting. While the entity is not necessarily evil, seeing one like this in a good dream is truly, for lack of a better word, wrong.