The Humocchio Universe

My name is Paolo. And, I think that "me writing this" is a bit of a "a waste of time". Yet, it's expected, as we want to explain, as do I, or at least understand, as do we. I think?

So, I understand.

Still, about me? I am not that interesting. Certainly, not any more than you. Else, I would have made a Humocchio out of me. But, I'd rather do you.

I think Apolo is that which I can be without expectations. Paolo is on the other end. While I am somewhere in between, that which couldn't have been otherwise.

I grew up at the unlikely intersection of an Italian coal-miners family and a Belgian artistic family. All because of a lost key. The universe is like that, chaotic, and that's just right.

Through them, I learned about most things relevant. I was incredably fortunate, as I am incredibly curious. They were incredibly patient, as I took nothing for granted.

If I'd choose a role model, it'd be Da Vinci. If you'd ask me for quotes, I'd give you Einstein's "Imagination is more important than Knowledge" and my great-grandfather's "boy, if you don't learn to fall, you're never gonna learn a thing".

And with that, and some other things, I became me. Someone that loves men and machines alike, someone that experiences life in the complex plain of logic and intuition. Someone that kept the Pan-boy alive, the one that loves experiencing, dreaming, understanding, and drawing about it. And, when you allow that boy to take over, he's a force of being, bending persistent stretches of "finish what you started" into twisty mountainroads.

Well, that boy crossed something like the Brenner Pass, last August 2022, when the weather was both favorable and unexpected, shifting focus to something I had been doing all along in everything that I created: seeking beauty.

It doesnt' feel like it changed me much, becoming an artist, I am still me, with a set of skills to serve my curiosity. No, I will keep doing what I did before. But now, I will draw about it more, thinking things through differently.

In this, my drive is people, which lead to the Humocchio Universe, a peek into my mind, about how I see people, what I love about them, what they make me feel, and think about. An endless journey of encountering things to love, to be marvelled about, through interplay. To show them how I represent them, to express how I recognize them.

To see what that does to them. How it moves and touches. That's what motivates me. And if they let me, I want to share that and their kind of beauty with the world.

I don't know where this will lead me, but I am good where I am now: On the lookout for Apolo.

It happens when I am with a person, or meet a person, or see a person. The light turns on. Suddenly, I want to express something best expressed in the Humocchio Universe.

And, it doesn't always happen when I want it to happen. In fact, it mostly happens when I don't expect it all.

When it happens, the motivation is strong. I cannot let go. It keeps my mind busy, sidelining way too many things. Until it makes sense. Until, I have given form to why I got triggered, and intuitively feel how the result will be.

Depending on whom, the situation, I will ask, get to know, verify, learn. All things polite. And, then, when permitted, I will sketch a portrait, in the real or from a photo, approximating the pose I had in mind.

That can happen fast, capturing the essence of a person, those principle lines that I recognize them by. After that, I tend to not go back, and work from memory, slightly changing body language and stance.

I hate starting over, and I hate living with imperfections. So, I thread carefully. Yet, things go wrong, forcing unexpected creativity. It's what keeps one young.

I like to keep things simple and mobile. So, I usually work on A3, using pencil and fine liner, saturating a kneaded eraser per drawing.

Over time, the sketch gets turned into a Humocchio creature, capturing the person's looks, dwelling in its landscape. That landscape gets more intricate over time, while developing the story. And in doing so, I don't work clean. Things get messy on paper. But they get clear in my mind.

Once I see the "final" drawing and hear the story reverberate off of it, I start outlining in ink. Gradually erasing parts and grayscaling them. It's much like writing a paper and then reviewing it.

It takes a while until they are finished. Some of them even a month of work, sometimes spread over several months in time. So, that's not nothing, that's not just because. And, that's how it needs to be.

So, a "Humocchio", what's that?

Well ... they are metaphorical creatures, born from my imagination. They are sculpted from how I recognize people, and molded from how I remember them. They are that within me that anticipates those they represent, the embodiment of how I think that these people think, and of that what I attribute to them.

Humocchios dwell in the scapes of my mind. They are neither kind nor evil, they have no will beyond my own. They roam where I think of them. And, when I think as them, they roam to places I have in common, places I had forgotten, places I love or hate, and places I had not yet thought of.

I create stories from these mental journeys, shaped as landscapes, surrounding Humocchios, complementing them. A multi-layered meta-portrait of the people they represent, of myself in these people, and thus of our connection.

And, that's what the "Humocchio Universe" is all about: It's a visual exploration of the abstract things going on in my mind.

"Tinderness" is my first try at a Humocchio of a real person. There have been some drawings leading up to this one, yet this is the first one within the concept "Human Landscapes".

The meaning behind this Humocchio, it's landscape, is quite minimal. It's about someone I didn't know well, however, somehow captivated me. Our paths crossed briefly during childhood. She had been a monitor in my youth movement, but we differed too much in age, and she never monitored my group.

We saw each other again at a reunion of that youth movement, near the end of 2018, where we talked about such things you talk about when you go way back, yet don't really know one another.

Some weeks later, I started thinking about making a Humocchio of a real person. And so, for inspiration, I decided to look on Facebook. I came across her profile, recalled our conversation, and she felt like a perfect first choice to try this concept on.

Her profile picture stood out. To me, it was the perfect tinder photo for what I felt to be a tender person. It led to a concept, in which I wanted to reflect her wish (at the time) for a typical family, and how people go about that nowadays. Something we talked about. Something I wished for too, making it personal to me, and thus something that connected us.

This year we met again, as my teacher at the academy. It is one of these strange circular things in life. I had it happen to me once before, but that's a story for another time.

This second Humocchio is of someone that I don't know. We do have some people in common and sometimes go to the same places. She is a fire artist, climber, and belly dancer.

I just really liked her photo. The folds in her clothing allowed for imagination. The expression on her face was both sweet and tough. The colors and shadows inspired style.

Furthermore, seeing her photo made me somewhat nostalgic of places I hadn't been in some time, like "De Bereklauw", or bars like "De Giraf". Places I associate her with. It even made me think back to when you still had "Den Olifant" and "De Krokodil". A time, when Leuven felt very different to me, when it had much more of a soul.

And so, this Humocchio is dedicated to my nostalgia.

"Hope" is a Humocchio about when things get difficult. Those moments when we are overwhelmed by cicumstances and can't seem to find the energy to see a better future. Those moments that we don't notice the subtle signs of things already getting better.

"Hope" is about never giving up. I drew it to motivate hope and positivism in her and us. I drew it to fuel perseverance.

From left to right, therefore, the water gets calmer, her Humocchio looking towards a better future, both fierceful and cheerful. A first butterfly in spring. A road made of piano keys for the music in her life, for its meaning to her life, and for the music she brought into my life.

In the back, a creature, representing "tough things", gently moving away from her.

The drawing sketches a feeling of that what I admire in her. To be ever positive, even in hard times, believing in better times, and working towards them with an amazing willpower. Playful, cheerful, finding beauty where no other would see it, surely, she is one of a kind.

Some things, part of a Humocchio, are neither for me to say nor for me to explain, ever. They are part of the person's inner personality, and the Humocchio's mystique, as it is the case for "Maffias", a Humocchio of a dear friend of mine.

I made this Humocchio for his birthday in 2019. Its name refers to a nickname he uses on the Internet with an ostriche as avatar. As I sketched him from his couch at the time, there is no photo matching the Humocchio.

Maffias is sometimes called a data hoarder by his older friends. That's not entirely fair though. After all, he is an economical price-conscious person with clear interests, so, by that, he restricts and focuses. And thus, at times, he will, almost god-like, remove parts of his data, with swift and deadly clicks, for other stuff to collect. Stuff he'll likely never ever use either.

I symbolize this trait by a forest of 0 and 1's, left bottom, as it is much like growing a forest of binary trees in some well-defined area, only frequenting the forest's outskirts, razing inner parts to the ground to make space for new trees. Note that in the middle of this forest, as an initial to his name, two of the central 1-trees form together the letter 'M', overarching the road.

I included his horoscope sign, swimming as concepts through the empty space of my mind. That felt appropriate, as, after all, this Humocchio was a birthday present.

The cat, or cats, looking at the fish, can be seen as: 1) a cat sitting, facing the fish, with her back (a plaza of sorts) to the right and her tail going underneath the beam, downward, to become a road, 2) a cat with her back towards the fish with her tail and body being a road and plaza, respectively, and 3) a cat laying with her back against the beam, with legs stretched forward to the left. They represent Maffias' love for cats, in particular his cats Nero and Aila.

Right about here, Maffias would say "hey, but the horoscope sign should only have two fish and I only have two cats", and my answer to this would be "exactly", as this demonstrates a part of his personality too, provoked by the drawing. That is, to him, things need to be clear, exact, well-planned, and make sense. And so, it was drawn as a tease to him, something I sometimes do.

The tail of the second cat, a road, goes by a field of pits. There are some of those pits to the left too. They represent bottle dungeons of sorts, gaping holes in the mind connected to oblivion. A place where things, difficult to retrieve, sometimes end up.

Such dungeons get a more interesting name in Flemish though, that is, they are called "Vergeetputten", which literally translates to "Forget Pits". They characterize Maffias' forgetfulness, as he is the kind of person that goes back to find something he had lost, to arrive there only to notice he has forgotten something somewhere meanwhile.

The ostriches in the drawing, inspired on Maffias' avatar, express seven poses you can see Maffias in when he reacts to things around.

They also link the real world to the Humocchio universe, where I imagine ostriches, burying their heads in the sand, to end up here. In a funny way that makes sense to me, considering both the origin of the idiom: "to bury one's head in the sand"; and its meaning.

It is, however, not intended at reflecting Maffias' personality. They could have popped up anywhere in the Humocchio universe, really.

Finally, Maffias sometimes gets distracted. His Humocchio shows this by letting one eye lag behind, noticing a planet of mushrooms sweeping by. And, even though the Humocchio's main focus seems to remain with you, it is likely planning for the right time to get you involved in that amazing event.

"The Deerest" is about a very dear friend of mine. I met her many years ago on an archaeological dig site in Turkey, near Antalia, at a place called Sagalassos.

It was rather her boyfriend (by now her husband) that I got to know better that year. Both were there as renovation architects, to rebuild old Greek and Roman stuff, dug up by a team of Turkish and Belgian archaeologists.

The place also needed IT support. And so it happened that I got offered to help out with that, as a summer job. An offer I couldn't really refuse, as it felt as close as I ever could hope to get to that Indiana Jones kid's fantasy.

In the year after, in winter, when I went visiting them in Istanbul, I also got to know her much better. We had so much fun that week, in what was an amazing city with an almost mythical history, a place where we filled our mornings, at Bosporus shores, drinking hot Çay and talking, under beautifully cold sunrises.

Over the years, they became both ... how to put this ... "so very deer" to me, her being someone so much like me. Someone very close although far away.

I drew "The Deerest" when I was visiting them in Istanbul in 2019. I sketched her while she was working, and so I do not have a matching photo. She was doing work she wanted to break free of. We had just talked about that in the days before, her telling me, among other things, that she was curious about carpentry, and about a simpler life.

The hammer freeing an imagined moon, from the gravity of the mind, symbolizes this. Things I have wondered about, longed for, too. And, therefore, I included a conflicted self to the right of her, molded from her landscape, to sign this drawing with. As listening to her made me wonder about it too. It made me feel similar.

This Humocchio, to me, is definitely about life. About the struggle we find in tediousness. About where to draw the line between work and passion. Whether to risk passion, turning it into work. And about how it conflicted both of us.

Its title, "The Deerest", is not a typo. At some point, we ended up joking together, us and them, addressing each other for Christmas with "my deer" for "my dear", and it stuck.

Finally, the drawing style and the landscape is inspired on her drawings, as a tribute to her amazing work, and to emphasize our common need to express ourselves through it.

I made this Humocchio about Bert, as a birthday card to him. He is as a brother to me. I gave it along with a lock box, with the words "the code to open the lock is hidden inside the drawing, and in the box you'll find your gift".

He could have brute forced the lock. However, I had foreseen that: He would only have stumbled upon something for which he had to solve the riddle anyway. So, it would have been "pointless", as I told him.

So, yes, this Humocchio drawing is a "birthday riddle". One that revolves around scripts. It's named "Ogma", after a deity from Irish and Scottish mythology. A deity, considered to be the inventor of Ogham, the script in which Irish Gaelic was first written. A deity both strong and eloquent, things I attribute to Bert too.

My interest in scripts started with a common interest of ours: fantasy; and, more specifically, when first reading "Lord of the Rings". It fascinated me, as I just couldn't grasp how it was conceived of, the depth of it all. It sparked furthermore an interest in Gaelic and Celtic worlds of old and their beliefs, as reflected in the name of the drawing.

My interest in letters started earlier, in fact, from the first time I understood what they were. I spent hours and days practicing them, until my fingers hurt too bad. Already then things weren't supposed to be just functional. It felt there was no purpose in that. Preferably, they should be, but at the same time maximizing beauty (or at least something).

I recognize that trait in Bert too, not only in the way how he writes beautifully, but in all that he creates. To him, as to me, things get boring when the variability of beauty or ingenuity has been exhausted. That, or when the effort to go beyond isn't worth the fun anymore.

And so, him reminding me of that, inspired me to create a script for the riddle of his Humocchio. One in which I wrote his birthday message, sculpted in the landscape of his left arm, with his Humocchio looking at it to indicate that it is the first thing for him to solve. The key, however, to decoding the script is found bottom left in mirror writing, reading "#Prime is the key".

#Prime is a placeholder script for the English alphabet, based on what I think is a most beautiful mathematical principle. Even though it is inspired on the Templar's script, it's rather different in how it works, as I wanted #Prime to be more extendible. I also wanted it to have a more alien/futuristic look, and it to be something that could be written or sculpted easily, with very few simple rules to decode and encode.

And that's all you get, as I didn't give any more to Bert either. Well, I did, as there is a second part to the hint: "and sigma the solution", left bottom, referring to the chess game on the right.

Chess is how I met Bert for the first time, way back in secondary school. He was awesome at it. A natural. And so, I had to add some reference to that too.

The chess play is determined by the #Prime symbols written in the chess pieces. It is an old Arabic game, for white to win, to teach the chess player an important (life's) lesson.

It took Bert almost a year to get the code to open the box. I am sure he would have been able to do it much faster though. But, it's in his nature to be efficient with how he spends time and effort. And so, to motivate him to do it within the year, I had to tell him that he wouldn't get any more birthday gifts from me until he solved the riddle, as he really very much likes to get gifts.

His totem animal is a turtle, so I added that instead of his horoscope sign. The turtle, cruising through my mind, is looking somewhat sternly at you. Much in the same way a librarian would look at you, when you enter a library, to warn you to keep things calm. After all, Bert likes to do his stuff unbothered.

At around his heart, there is a gecko to express his love for South-East Asia, and Thailand in particular. Stamped into the landscape of his torso, to the right of the gecko, there is a bike, symbolizing his love for bike rides. This stamp can also be seen as a little "Keith Harring" man, being warped from one wormhole into the next. This represents how he likes to explore new things, to live them truly, to spend a lot of time and effort on them, to then let them be and replace them with new passions.

Finally, notice that the water flow at around his neck doesn't make complete sense, while it does. Sometimes his logic is like that. I am pretty sure he knows it very well too, being a rational person. I am also sure he has fun doing it: arguing in favor of something until the other party just gives up to try to find fallacies in his reasoning. I love him for it, him knowing that things can be argued for indefinitely.

I met Lucie at Space Safari in 2019. That's a Belgian psy-trance and electronic music festival. One of the nights, when my friends went to bed early, I decided to wander around on my own. It was a cold and humid night after a hot end-of-summer day. And so, I ended up at a campfire.

Many people passed by, but towards the morning only few remained, and she and her friends were most of them. I think they had been there for a while, we just didn't talk, and when it was just us we didn't talk much either. We just started sharing, and had a good time: comfy, relaxed, open. In fact, an expression of all traits I came to know Lucie for later, things I like so much about her.

And then they too went. I sticked around, right until night became morning. Then my friends woke up, I joined them, and crashed besides them on a slope, with fast music in the foreground, warmed by the sun just peeking above the tree line.

Suddenly, maybe hours later, I felt fingers playing piano on my face, gently caressing my forehead, cheeks and eyelids. Then, someone asking for a lighter. It was smooth, very smooth. There was that sudden urge to fight back against waking up, I felt it, but it was overwhelmed by curiosity.

I opened my eyes, as in a lucid dream, and saw a girl with long hair as made of golden filigrain, the sun behind her head, it making it all glow, shine and twinkle, while I looked up-side-down into her kaleidoscope eyes.

The girl resembled the one from the night before. And, with each blink of the eyes that image sharpened, like my mind was lazy loading her into my dream world. I think we talked a bit. Not much. I don't quite remember now. It was so fleeting.

In the days after, we started chatting and decided to meet. I asked if I could make her into a Humocchio, and explained what that meant.

She agreed to it, and we met again, drawing her and talking to her. And so we became friends, mates, as it is so incredibly relaxing to spend time with her. It's simple.

The landscape definitely needed a reference to the Ardeche, not only to refer to her French roots, but also to refer to our love for that region. So, to capture that, I included bridges like you can find in the region, as well as its "gorges", cutting through the landscape, with wild waterfalls across her shoulder.

A similar but different bridge, in the front, is partially supported by a sort of futuristic anti-gravity device, keeping it aloft above the depths of my mind. A sci-fi element, energized by "focus", to refer to our common interest in fantasy, sci-fi, graphic novels and comics.

The structures, left and right, holding the landscape together, symbolize her love for electronic music, and specifically techno. It is an abstraction, inspired on images I remember from when I listened to techno in my 20's. Like the one you saw on album covers or party flyers.

This Humocchio is the first one where I clearly show that a Humocchio's landscape is but a slice of that which it takes to represent a person in my mind. Something like a surface with a gaping black abyss below, to represent the unknown, the subconscious, that on which my mind is built. To capture those things I do not understand or notice about her or myself.

At the top of the drawing you find her Humocchio, looking ever positively in the distance, outward, to others, to help. Behind that, there is a family of dolphins. It represents the importance of family and family values to her.

The pufferfish is anxiously trying to get away from them, after they played around with it. Something dolphins do.

And so, "Lucie in the Sky with Dolphins" was born, hinting at Lucie's British origins, referring to a Beatles song, with lyrics that sketch circumstances similar in feeling to how we met, at what kind of a place, how it felt looking in her eyes, how we met again, and got in touch afterwards.

Judge Dredd is about a friend that studied law. He likes to think about justice, about what is right and wrong, and about judgement. He has strong feelings towards that and opinions on it, along with a interest in history, literature, and such, to back it all up.

He is also a conflicted person, maybe because of that background. Beautifully unfitting. Perfectly odd. Kind. Welcoming. Strict. Forgiving. Someone at the border of worlds, a thing which reminds me of myself.

Even though it was an obvious choice to make this Humocchio about judgement, it was one I postponed thinking about for a long time. Making a Humocchio had always been my choice, my intention, as it needs to be. Yet, he helped me, and asked this in return. So, it felt as an obligation.

And thus, my inner contrarian and my inner knight had brutal fights, that perpetuated because he asked about progress, lasting about a year and a half, I guess until he stopped asking, and until I managed to reconcile both aspects in me.

So, ultimately, "Judge Dredd" came to be, and for those not into comics, Judge Dredd is a fictional character in a world where judges not only judge. They also observe the infraction and execute the punishment. A punishment which usually is death.

The Humocchio, "Judge Dredd", however, doesn't actually refer to that character from those comics. I wouldn't want him to be compared to such a take on justice. Like me, he firmly beliefs in the separation of power. In fact, it was done as a play of words, as a tease to him, referring both to judgement and the dreadful look in his eyes. That of someone about to judge. And so, "Judge Dredd" was both appropriate and ironic.

Anyway, the name of the drawing aside, this Humocchio is made to look as if it is going to judge you, where judgement is raining across and through the Humocchio. After all, there is a certain sadness that comes with judgement, one due to empathy with those judged. Such empathy is, to me, a necessary ingredient of judgement, where the sadness resulting from it, is the cost to pay to get to judge. That which grounds your judgement. That which makes judgement acceptable to the judged.

Such empathy and willingness to face that sadness are traits I see in him too. Something I admire in him.

Now ... judgement is about meaning, and meaning comes in pairs, out of nothing, by necessity, to give rize to that which things are and aren't. We develop judgement by understanding meaning, and by judgement we understand or appreciate meaning.

To symbolize this, I let Adam and Eve bring an apple, from the tree of Good and Evil, to the judged, referring to the biblical story, Genesis.

It represents a most fundamental differentiation, that of good vs. evil, fitting to the topic of this Humocchio, but also fitting as in the story it represents that which sparked our consciousness and conscience.

Therefore, by handing the judged the apple, the intention is to make him conscienceful, to reflect on his judgement. To know shame.

From left to right, going from lush to desert, there is symmetry. A symmetry that gets broken by the good and the bad assigned to each side. It emphasizes that judgement changes depending on circumstances or viewpoint. After all, a creature accustomed to the desert would not think that a tropical region is a good place.

Then, as judgement is raining through the Humocchio, it ends in a pool where two fish are swimming, representing Yin and Yang, the duality notion from eastern belief. They are there to focus on the fact that there can be no good, if there is no appreciation of that which is bad.

Judgement then finds its way further down, into the depths of my mind. There where things are considered that just feel good or bad for no reason at all. It falls down behind our western symbols for judgement, the scale and the sword, representing that judgement can have two sides, that of answering the question of crime and that of the appropriate punishment.

The closets on which the world of this Humocchio is built, describe the complexity and bureaucracy which marks our current justice system, but also the vast history leading up to it. In one of the closets, a bit hidden, is a reference to ancient Egypt, to symbolize the belief that judgement is a thing of the gods.

They believed that when you died, your heart was weighed against a feather. If your heart were heavier, it, the home of your soul, would be eaten by a crocodile god named "Ammit", and gone you were. If it were lighter, your soul would be accepted in afterlife. Today, we still use the idiom "to have a heavy heart", referring to such judgement.

Finally, to the right top of the drawing you see our earth. Around it a sphere, separating the real world from that of my mind. Crawling on it, a scorpion, his horoscope sign. It relates the Humocchio universe to the real world using a reference to an ancient Greek worldview, where fixed stars (constellations) and wandering stars (planets) were creatures and gods, living beyond the orbit of the moon.

"Titania" is a Humocchio of someone I nearly spent a lifetime with. She is like a queen ought to be in a faery tale: stately, proud, steadfast, imaginative, and pleasantly twisted. It is about her who first called the creatures of this universe Humocchios.

"Titania" originates from Ancient Greek mythology, where it is a title that refers to daughters of Titans. Later, it was the name given to the queen of Elves by Shakespeare.

I called this drawing "Titania" just before finishing it. I had been calling it "The Storyteller" until then, as it was based on her love for storytelling, and her being really good at it too. Ultimately, "Titania" felt better for many reasons, capturing the storytelling part as well.

So, let's walk you through Titania's story, on roads morphing into elements, and back. A story about storytelling, and, more specifically, the kind of stories called "Conquering the princess with a riddle".

Types of stories get codes, and for this kind that code is "ATU 851". You can find a reference bottom left in the drawing of this, and, just above, there is a QR code. In it, I encoded a riddle of a typical story of the kind.

The QR code is made to look like it is a structure, embedded in the landscape, a place where things live, or rather dwell. The riddle is repeated as text in the ears of the elephant using the #Prime script. We had a lot of fun using the script, writing messages to each other, around the time I was creating "Ogma".

The theme refers to when I met her, when I fell in love with her. I published a message, as a language riddle to her, to conquer her, the princess in my story.

To the left of the elephant, there is a tribe of mushrooms visiting their newborns in the greenhouse. The greenhouse has the shape of a piece of pie, serving as an incubator.

The elephant, an animal she admires, has towers of Babylon as feet. These towers refer to a biblical story, telling about how the different languages of the world came to be, and they represent the importance of language to storytelling. They furthermore indicate, by being the feet of the same creature, that independent of language, similar stories are found all over the world.

Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of storytelling for transmitting knowledge, because for as long as we can remember, across generations, even today, long after we invented writing, storytelling is one of the most important ways to convey knowledge.

On top of these towers of Babylon, in the legs of the elephant, there are huge cities behind glass. I imagine them to be places where the fantasy creatures of this world live.

Her Humocchio is made to look like if she is about to tell you a story. To the left of her is her bodyguard, a battle elf, ready to jump at you should you mean any harm to her queen.

To the right, a crow telling Titania a story, possibly about the castle in the sky. You can reach that castle by climbing the beanstalk. That's what it's there for. And, if you did, you would find it to be built inside a giant snowball, something Titania really likes. It is pulled along by the beanstalk, gently shaken while her landscape folds towards you.

Titania is slightly annoyed by the crow's presence, as can be seen in her eyes, or at least I can. If you look closely, even though she keeps her attention with you, she wills a twig around the neck of the crow, to make it bugger off. After all, it should have known better not to disturb her when her attention is with you.

This Humocchio is about Kuroshio, or simply Kuro. He is a friend of mine, from my "Elite Dangerous" gaming group: the "Children of Raxxla".

We met a couple of years back, when I was accepted into their ranks. He is a consul there, that is, someone that invests loads of time to keep our group alive and together. They also represent us in the larger community, and in doing so, Kuro is a diplomat at heart.

Kuro is good at many things, but I think he is amazing at poetry and proza. He has an ability to truly play with words, layering them, shifting their meaning, employing them in ways that offend no one, everyone, or anything in between.

Furthermore, he has an ability to pronounce words at speeds unheard of, much like a train, built on "Deutsche Gründlichkeit", storming at you, flooding your brain with concepts, causing your logic to overflow into intuition. I am sure that same experience would have happened, even if I had heard it in my mother tongue.

I decided to make this Humocchio of his when I saw him perform live. It was online due to CoVID. And so thanks to CoVID, I could easily join him in Berlin from Belgium. The photo, that I used for this Humocchio, is a screenshot that I took during that performance, when he was performing at the speed of sound, telling about a girl who's name started with an 'S', a name he didn't quite remember.

"The Sailor's Shipwreck" is thus an ode to him, and in particular to that performance of his, but also to poetry, referring to the tale of "The shipwrecked sailor", one of the first written down pieces of proza that survived to this day (hieroglyphics on papyrus).

This story provides the setting of the painting. A setting to describe his love for literature and poetry, his heritage in shipping, and that what he loves to do as his digital self, Kuroshio: to explore, discover, marvel, and to look beyond.

חופש is pronounced as Hofesh. It is Hebrew (written right to left) and means Freedom. It is also the name of one of my most favorite people in the world. She is really something! The true embodiment of Freedom, and one of my twin souls.

I met her at Boom Festival 2022 in Portugal. I was drawing. It was way too hot to do anything else really, like "40 °C in the shade" hot. I must have peaked her interest, as suddenly Hofesh was standing next to me. She does that when things peak her interest, with no effort at all.

We started talking, and time flew by. When she left, I drew some more, thinking about how there had been mutual understanding in almost everything, and about how I hugged her dearly farewell. After all, the chance of meeting someone twice at Boom is so very small, even when you know where to look.

But, we did meet again, and again, and again, as if things configured themselves so that it had to happen. Truly, I still can't wrap my scientific head around it. And so it also came to happen that when Boom was over, we travelled on together, and ended up at ZNA gathering later that month, none of which was planned, nor expected, as such is Freedom.

We talked a lot, fooled around, played, relaxed, enjoyed the little things. Got to know each other so well. It was just nice. It was free. And, it lead up to this Humocchio about her, about Freedom.

I have thought quite a bit about what Freedom could mean in the past. In fact, ever since I sat on that bar stool in a place called "De Wereld", not even 20 years old, still firmly believing that I could know it all.

What did I get out of it? Mostly, that I cannot hope to ever know, I guess, and maybe that I was supposed to think like that, as I was to draw and write about it, and that I cannot hope to even know that.

But let's not jump to conclusions, as there is in fact a whole reasoning I should bore you to death with, to back that up.

I wrote it all down. Things about determinism. About our universe. About our inability to predict, the chaos we necessarily face, the complexity of things.

I deleted most of it though.

The next part, however, I cannot not include. It is what this Humocchio drawing is about. A notion of Freedom related to thinking itself, as a property of consciousness. One related to thinking about how we think. A notion propelling us back at least a century in Mathematics, when three questions were asked, with life-changing answers to me.

The first question was on completeness. That is, on whether every statement, that we can think of, can either be proven true or false.

There was a profound hope that, at least formally, things would be complete, even though we had been facing paradoxes since ancient times. Nevertheless, Gödel proved that once things get sufficiently expressive, they must get incomplete too, and did so by constructing a self-referential statement, much like "You cannot prove this statement".

And when you think about it, you can always construct statements like that. Consider, for example, "This statement is false." or "Will the set, that contains all sets that do not contain themselves, contain itself?" , or, in a more religious context, "If god is almighty, then can he make a stone that he cannot lift?".

The second question was on consistency. That is, on whether we can prove, from within a theory, that no inconsistency will ever pop up. Gödel proved that we cannot know, that our theories can only be proven wrong, never right.

Finally, the third question was about solving problems, or rather proving statements true or false. That is, on whether there can be a single predetermined approach to proving all things true, that can be proven true.

Turing proved that there cannot be, and did so by introducing his Turing machine, a minimal concept of a universal computer. We can always come up with a true statement that cannot be proven true in some predetermined algorithmic way.

These answers were a disappointment to many, and could get you demotivated, as then what purpose do we have, what sense is there in exploring if we don't know that we are on the right track? To know that we cannot know. To know that we cannot even know all of this.

Yet, to me, this is what Freedom is about. Else, wouldn't it be extremely boring, feeling utterly confining (if we even had that word), to be born in a world where everything can be known for certain? A world where all questions can be solved by a single approach? Wouldn't we be dead the moment we got born?

Instead, what we got is today's plethora of partially overlapping world views, each addressing the incomplete parts in the others. Each of us free to think we are not wrong until proven wrong, upon which we can modify, free to think of new ways of thinking, leading to truths we couldn't have foreseen otherwise.

Isn't that utterly amazing, that Freedom is in our inability to know? That it can be seen as a property of consciousness, the theory of our mind. That with which we experience life, making it necessarily worth the experience, and giving birth to our creativity!

This Humocchio is about this understanding.

In it, Hofesh, my twin soul, gets a reference to Artemis, the twin of Apollo from Greek mythology. And this makes sense since I always sign my drawings as Apolo, yes with one 'L'. A friend started calling me that, and therefore it is just the first two letters of Paolo switched. Symbols throughout history for Artemis are the deer, the bow (or sickle of the moon), and sometimes an olive tree (a Mediterranean reference). You find these symbols to the right.

The deer is a Persian fallow deer (Dama mesopotamica), to be found in Israel and Iran. Yes, it is free to roam in enemy countries, and it has been chosen to refer to Hofesh's Israeli background, as well as making a point that we invent borders and enemies, as she would agree on.

Hofesh, as @Hagzura (Instagram), cuts patterns in clothing while you wear them, with astonishing results. It is in fact amazing when you see her do it (in the middle of the dance floor, with 10.000 people around), and it feels amazing when she does it to you.

She also did that to my mind, showing me what Freedom meant to her. Hence, I represented such a cutout in my mind using a pattern that emerges all over nature. One she is intrigued by. That of the cochlea, or spiral. Its beauty finds meaning in notions such as the Fibonacci sequence, or the way how nature builds. In its limit, you find the golden ratio, expressing things going right in nature.

Behind the cutout, I represent reality. It is much more monochrome and that's on purpose, as we often color things with our minds, or fill in the gaps. Behind the center of the cutout is our sun, to the left of it the earth and our moon. It represents our universe, lurking in the back of my mind. It represents that on which my mind is built, or rather in which it is embedded.

However, as I drew it, it too must be a concept in my mind, one just beyond my control. And, in a way, that gave meaning to how thinking can arise from thinking, a realization, or rather experience, that Hofesh caused in me. She showed me the Freedom I got from that. That which can happen and be created in my mind. How thinking yields thinking.

The cutout, furthermore, represents a Turing machine, referencing the third question from above. Through it, I run a Turing tape. On it, you find binary code, 0 and 1s spelling "Hunky Dory" in ASCII code.

"Hunky Dory" is a way to respond to the question "How do you do?", and when thinking of Freedom, it feels to me like the appropriate response to give.

It also refers to an album of David Bowie, one that inspires thinking about Freedom and its meaning. This is especially so in tracks 6 and 7, respectively, "Quicksand" and "Fill Your Heart", receiving track numbers with (almost religious) symbolism, that show the bad in such reflections and the good.

This album of David Bowie, to me, is a master piece, and it existing is a consequence of what Freedom means to me.

To emphasize the point further, I freed the 0 and 1's on the tape into butterflies and dragonflies. They represent Hofesh's female and male sides, as she likes to tell you about. She even depicts this with her hands flying as a butterfly, when she talks about Freedom.

The pattern, as a Turing machine, emphasises further that I believe that I too could be reduced to such a machine. That which I think I am. That which allows me to imagine. That which makes me incomplete, as shown in the drawing.

Freeing the butterfly at the bottom, as a layover to the pattern, is the embodiment of that incompleteness. After all, the pattern should cut it out too. It did become part of the world of my mind, the world of Hofesh's Humocchio. But, at the same time it shouldn't, since the butterfly, being a 0, originated from the tape, being run through the machine of my mind.

And so, the butterfly should be both behind the cutout and in front of it. Or neither of that, as neither one makes complete sense. A visual statement of sorts, drawn and imagined, without a sensible solution.

Now, notice how the water flows around the center of the drawing, that is, in Hofesh's body. It might feel consistent, while in fact it isn't. The water must flow upward for the bottom waterfall to exist. For that you need to see the whole picture, as locally things do make sense. So, it's an inconsistency, derivative in nature, made to look consistent by the way how we observe things as human beings, how our perception works.

To the right bottom of the drawing you find water piping, the one in the back, going across Hofesh's arm, feels/looks inconsistent. At first sight it shouldn't be behind the pillar, even though changing perspective might make you see that it could very well exist like that, it being not a vertical pillar, or a pillar at all, coming slightly forward instead of going down.

Both situations refer to the second question, and to what we should watch out for when calling out wrongs in theories that are only wrongs at first sight, and rights which become fallacies when we think beyond their immediate implications.

I wanted to make the Humocchio give a sense of Freedom, and so it is made to look like Hofesh is being freed from herself, from her body. Floating upward, while looking at infinity and beyond, in a way willing the cutout.

Her body, filled by waterfalls, is held down by the weight of the world of my mind. It is to show that Hofesh constantly escaped that which I represented her into. It refers to how she made me feel many times, and the frustration that went with that. It is about what she thought me not to feel. And thus, it is about loving without expectations, admiring and creating without keeping, appreciating even though fleeting, while releasing and finding comfort in that acceptance.

Finally, right bottom, you have a die connecting the water piping, with a tower built on top for regulation. It refers to Einstein's statement "god does not play with dice". It is a visual side note on how he and we just can't know how things really are, always facing that which we can't look beyond.

This humocchio is a drawing made of a girl, from France, that I met two years ago, online. I sold her a spare Space Safari ticket. It was somewhere around August 2021.

Then, last minute, she sold that ticket as she couldn't go. Yet, decided to go anyway, and bought another one through TicketSwap. I, on the other hand, couldn't go, as CoVID was still very much an issue at home. So, we never actually met in person.

We, however, started chatting, and as I liked this photo of her a lot, I wanted to capture my first impressions of her along with it. So, I asked if she would mind if I turned her into a humocchio, and showed what it meant.

She didn't, and so, around autumn, when on a weekend to "De Ardennen", after having chatted with her a couple of times, I sketched her portrait, turned that into a Humocchio, and started on the landscape.

I didn't finish it then though. That was more recently, end of 2022, when I came across it. It felt long overdue. We had not talked much in the year before either, so I had lost my impression of her a bit. Yet, when I saw the sketch in detail, it reminded me of her interests and a certain elegance she had conveyed.

And so, her dot became a tennis ball, for the sport she loves to play. The wind mill, holding a sword, is a reference to literature, and more specifically "Don Quichote". The lake in the front, with the swan flying over, references her love for ballet, hence also the title of the drawing, "The Swan Lake".

This Humocchio is about "De Jijris". I made it for his 42nd birthday. And, just like there is no good way to describe him, there is no good way to tell this Humocchio's story.

Jijris is one of the <Some-Most-Unexpected-Superlative> people you'll ever meet. Someone you'll feel strongly about, for sure. And, I say that with a smile, thinking of how people usually react to him, how they can be stupefied by him.

Jijris has a tendency to go along with the unusual, the improbable, against the mainstream, especially when the implications are enticing. It's really a thing we all do, maybe not to his extent, but it is how we are wired, I'm afraid.

Yes, truth is a difficult matter, especially when it concerns ourselves, bent by ambition, necessity, inability, taboo, trauma, compassion, and whatnot.

Jijris, if you'd allow him, will talk to you about the strangest of things, bizarre theories, counter-intuitive fallacies, imaginary histories, game lore, dispersing it around, as if it's all factual, as if he didn't question it, as if he just recites.

Beware, he does it, really, because he is questioning it all, sieving it, because he isn't sure why he is here, why he exists. He wants an answer to that! To purpose. As we all do? And, time is short.

Hence, he provokes answers to that big question, and in doing so, he doesn't subject to the mainstream, sometimes not even to common sense. He has no fear of ridicule in that regard. It's too important to him. It's almost as if his purpose in life is "finding purpose".

Now, I think that would be meta-cool! But, I am quite sure he wouldn't agree, which makes it meta-meta-cool, I guess.

Even though this Humocchio is about Jijris, its message is one that concerns us all. Jijris can take that from me, being subjectified in a drawing like this, so that I can touch on things beyond him or me. I am even sure he would have liked the idea of it, something short of martyrdom, with a cause, sufficiently provocative, that he'd have volunteered anyway. I can hear him laugh at the mere thought of this, a hearty, juicy, infectious, and perhaps even slightly exaggerated laugh. A laugh you'd recognize from far away.

Yet, as "And, Jesus he knows me!" was a birthday present to him, I didn't ask. I wanted it to be a surprise. And so, I hope I was right.

Hence, with that being said, to cover for what I am about to embark on, because it is all very very tricky, I added a footnote in the form of an ostrich, popping by in Jijris' world.

It's as explained in Maffias' Humocchio: ostriches when burying their heads in the sand, pop up in the Humocchio Universe; and the one visiting here reminds us that this Humocchio, although inspired on, is not only about Jijris. It is there to remind us that it was not made to judge, rather to appreciate and to enrich.

Therefore, the ostrich looks firmly and strictly, following the viewer's focus, every thought, determining intention, as to keep us humble. To keep us equal. Ostriches are really good at that.

I don't remember exactly when I took this picture of Jijris, the one from which this Humocchio is derived. It's one of those moments you'd share with him, where you want to laugh uncomfortably for what's happening, having feelings bordering vicarious shame, but you can't since he is way too serious about it all. So, you are perplexed instead.

The situation made me think of the "Genesis" song: "Jesus he knows me". The song's obvious message is a relevant one, especially considering the fake news age, and in that sense this Humocchio serves as a warning to Jijris, and us all.

However, the song's underlying message is what made me want to create this Humocchio. To me, the song is really about our need for purpose, to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. It's about that which drives us to belong, and how it seems easier to cope with the incomprehensible by shifting responsibility to culture, religion, and the likes. A form of escapism that enabled, throughout the ages, the institutionalization of belief, and its abuse.

To me, it is about realizing that shifting responsibility doesn't make purpose any less personal. One still delivers purpose. And, if we are to consider ourselves as free men, then indeed big questions, such as on purpose, are on us and us alone.

Which brings me, in a "ooo-squirrel-moment à la Jijris", to Jijris' age: 42; and the story of his Humocchio.

The number 42 is an infamous number for its meaning in science fiction. Whenever I see it, it reminds me of the answer to the "Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" as calculated by "Deep Thought", a supernatural-computer built by the "Magratheans".

It is one of many stories told in a book called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and to explain this drawing, I am afraid, I will need to spoil it, slightly:

So, when construction of Deep Thought was finished, the Magratheans proposed it to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question. It answered that it would have to "think about it", and that that would take 7.5 million years. When finished, Deep Thought revealed that the answer was 42. The Magratheans, waiting millions of years for that answer, felt dismay. Yet Deep Thought chided them for not understanding the question.

The Magratheans then learned that Deep Thought couldn't calculate the Ultimate Question itself, and that, to that end, it had designed its successor, a computer so large it resembled a planet, and of such complexity that organic life itself was part of its operating matrix. The Magratheans were to evolve into mice, and descend to the planet, known today as Earth, to operate its 10 million year long program.

To me, all of that sounds pretty plausible. Almost a way to look at things religiously and spiritually. Something close to intelligent design. Something Jijris might resonate with. And so, in this world, that of Jijris' Humocchio, I am going along with it, except for Magratheans becoming mice, that's just ridiculous. It makes way more sense for them having evolved into dodos instead, leaving Earth in their spaceships rather than going extinct. Surely, that is what happened some 400 years ago, when humans came bothering them on their little paradise earth-computer-control island!

Spinning off on that thought, us all being part of an immense computer called Earth, collectively computing the "Ultimate Question" to which the answer is 42, I could only conclude that to operate this machine, one would need access to the Humocchio Universe for reasons of inception. Hence, that's what the dodo, Dodgson, is doing here, in Jijris' world, with his spaceship, named "Occam's Razor".

He is waiting for all of Jijris' concepts to be processed, to be sieved, or rather sliced by its ship's principle, while he is reminiscing at the end of a flooded world, looking over it's edge and beyond, conceptually smoking a pipe.

Dodgson's thoughts? He is thinking about the dodo effect, some term coined by psychotherapists on the Caucus game he invented. A game described in "Alice in Wonderland", written by Dodgson himself.

So what was that game about? It was about running yourself dry. About being all winners in the end. It not being a competition, really, but more of an accomplishment. That is, independent of how the participants ran themselves dry, which was in all sorts of directions and ways, they ended up dry.

In psychotherapy, the dodo effect relates to the understanding that independent of the therapy applied, the only quantifiable measure is it being effective. That is, it having worked or not.

And by extension, to me, that's about life itself, with death as its accomplishment. Who knows, there might even be a price at the end, if Alice brought enough candy.

Revisiting Dodgson's spaceship, you can see that the conceptual clouds, of what I think Jijris thinks, are being sliced by Occam's Razor. Its principle: "When multiple theories explain the same observation, then the simplest one is most likely the correct one".

Why do I think this is a good guideline? For one, because simple theories are easiest to refute, and that's what you do with theories. And, as it is more productive to fail fast, I prefer to start simple.

Secondly, because it corresponds to how I believe nature works. How mechanisms based on simple principles are more robust, benefitting survival, and it are these mechanisms of nature that I am trying to explain after all.

Occam's razor is often criticized by things like the emergence of complexity in organisms or "Hickam's dictum" (another good name for a spaceship). But one should not confuse that which "simple" means here. It's not about the number of causes for observed symptoms, or about how complexity arises. It is about likelihood relative to required functionality.

That is, while things evolve through competition and circumstances, they also strive to be as simple as possible to do what they need to do, continuously becoming the most robust version of that which they are, becoming that which is most beautiful within the confines of "functional requirements".

Occam's razor to me is about that kind of simplicity, and this holds too when relating causes to symptoms, that is, when also regarding the mechanisms connecting cause to symptom.

Some of Jijris' concepts originated from games like Blood Bowl and Warhammer. He just loves the lore of those games, loves to submerge himself in it, loves to role play it out. That's why I included a Blood Bowl moon, to reference that. It's a place of "decommissioned" dark elves, some with shattered bones and fractured skulls, spending their well-earned retirements from the gamefield, playing Hearthstone.

His horoscope sign, pisces, had to be included, to refer to his birthday, but also to astrology as a place to turn for purpose, and, as you can see, these fish are frantically fleeing the scene to avoid becoming sashimi.

Finally, Jijris' Humocchio expresses him being at peace, being blessed, being content, in a way willing the processing of his concepts while welcoming the inception. The landscape depicts an interplay of offering, believing, accepting, and praying, in a setting that refers to stories of floods, disaster, and the end of worlds. A setting where you can hitch a ride on a spaceship in the form of a razor blade.

It intuitively describes that which I love about him, that which he brings to the equation of universal truth, and how that's equivalent to what we all bring.