Unearthed

My name is Ken Simonsen, and my piece for this year's Something Wicked is titled "Unearthed." This painting is part of an ongoing series called Surreal in Nature that portrays animals in unique ways and settings. The painting is done in a realistic style, using airbrushed acrylics on a 16-by-20-inch canvas. The image can be considered quite disturbing to onlookers, which is sort of the goal for Something Wicked. It features a half-buried skull on a mound of dirt. The top of the skull is broken, with a few broken pieces lying next to it. Within the exposed skull cavity is a tightly packed pile of large, slimy earthworms. The catch is that the earthworms are gathered together in the shape of a human brain.