Mystic Oak Bottle — © Megan Steffen, Untapped Media Inc.

This one has a lot of layers, both literally and figuratively speaking. While on a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico we stumbled into a gallery called Keep Contemporary. There, we discovered an artist named Melissa Parra Morrow. Her brilliant use of color and combination of mixed media materials creates a hallucinogenic visual experience that blasts off the canvas – or in this case, a 24” diameter circular wood panel with over 350 individually collaged pieces. After becoming lost in the piece, I realized that the shape and size were nearly identical to the size of an oak barrel head. We ended up going home with the Circle Of Morph that day, knowing that we needed to have Melissa create an original piece for us on one of our reused barrel heads. It would be six months before I spoke with Melissa about creating a piece, and two years before it made its way onto a bottle.

That summer I was camping in Lake Tahoe and ended up getting poison oak for the first time in my life. After a couple of weeks, I still hadn’t gotten rid of it, and so I found myself with a prescription for steroids in a final attempt at defeating the insidious poison once and for all. It worked. Though, it was confusing how the regressive dosage regimen was written, “Take five pills each day for the first two days, followed by four pills each day for the next two, then three, etc… until they are all gone.” Surely that didn’t mean five pills at one time?! On day one, about 20 minutes after ingesting 5 of the 10mg pills all at once, I found myself in a full-blown panic attack. The moment flashed by in a series of cinematographic reels. This was like the scene in Requiem for a Dream where seconds after taking the pills, the camera cuts to a close-up of my pupils dilating to the size of dinner plates, followed by an overhead angle of me pacing around the house rapidly over a hyper-lapsed time frame. Throw in a little B-roll footage of some clouds rolling in and the sky turning stormy, and I soon found myself on the phone with the advice nurse desperately trying to confirm if I’d read the dosage properly. They assured me that I did, and tell me that the head rush was “normal” for some users. Harder to convince your adrenal gland of that. I later recalled the story to a friend of mine, who promptly pointed out that “Poison Oak” would be a great name for a Subtle Spirits release. I pocketed the idea and that was that for a while… until one day I found myself drawn back to the work of Melissa Parra Morrow. I decided to reach out.

The inspiration behind the piece was loosely derived from a dream I had involving a big oak tree and a pentacle beaming from inside of it. Melissa brought her own interpretation, reminding me of the 400-year-old Angel Oak tree in Charleston, SC which happened to be near where she was living at the time. She had a clear vision of our intent the entire time, all while leaving room for the fluidity of not really knowing how the final piece would turn out.

Melissa is a freaking rockstar of a professional, whose patience is unparalleled. Beyond the sheer magnitude of time she put into this piece, she really brought a level of care, consideration, and thoughtfulness that has gone unmatched. Three months after beginning, the result was as magnificent as the process was meticulous, and Poison Oak was complete.

We finished the label design and submitted Poison Oak for COLA approval to the TTB. The joke was on us when they ended up rejecting us… twice. They said our use of the word “Poison”, was quote, “misleading” and “is in reference to drug paraphernalia, or a slang name for drugs, that suggests the product contains drugs.” Uh… no? We needed a plan B fast, so I read through the notes Melissa had written about the piece and came up with a title that would not only fit the artwork but pass COLA approval. And that's when we changed the name to Mystic Oak.

Read more about the Mystic Oak Art & the Process.

“It is the dosage that makes it a poison or a remedy…”