Showcase · UAP Art
UAP Art
Showcase · 03 — First Release
A limited series of hand-drawn field plates documenting anomalous aerial phenomena, continuing a family lineage of illustration and observation. Each plate is cataloged, numbered, and signed in the tradition of naturalist specimen illustration.
Möbi Ray
Plate I of L (1/50) · Graphite and charcoal on toned paper
Medium & Process
Rendered entirely in graphite and charcoal on aged, toned stock, worked without underdrawing in the traditional sense, built instead through layered shading and directional hatching until the form emerges from the ground rather than being outlined onto it. The paper's warm, weathered tone is left largely exposed as negative space, a deliberate choice that places the work closer to a recovered field document than a finished illustration, as though it had been drawn in the moment of observation and preserved since.
Composition
The piece is structured as a specimen plate in the naturalist tradition, an observed phenomenon rendered, labeled, and archived rather than imagined. A dual Möbius-torus form anchors each wing, a direct visual quotation of the topological geometry underlying the artist's broader Havell Model framework, here rendered not as diagram but as anatomy, as though the mathematics were load-bearing structure within the creature's own body. Suspended within the left wing panel, framed as though glimpsed through glass, is the vantage point of the original sighting: a rock-maze formation opening onto open sky, the position from which the object was first observed in flight. The right panel carries the plate's formal record, title, series number, and artist's mark, rendered in the same hand as the image itself rather than typeset, preserving the unity of observer and document.
Note
Möbi Ray inaugurates a limited series of fifty. Each plate is drawn individually and signed in sequence; none are reproduced or printed. The series draws formal lineage from Robert Havell Jr.'s engraving work for Audubon's Birds of America and from Frederick James Havell's early photographic documentation, translated here from ornithological record into the documentation of anomalous aerial phenomena.
Tori Ray — coming later this year.