Return of Peter Pan - by Kasia Turajczyk

Do we really have to give up our dreams and allow society to rule our lives? It starts from the moment that we are born: “You have to do so, you have to behave in this way, you can’t say that, you can’t do that, don’t look like that, don’t move, don’t cry, don’t laugh, don’t think, don’t breath”.

Lying is a bad thing to do but telling the truth isn’t good either.  When you grow up society expects from you to have a job, to make money, to find a partner to reproduce new offspring and after that do the same to them what your parents did to you; program them.

To Be or Not To Be - by Kasia Turajczyk

For thousands of years humans have agreed to be so and to do so.  Without any guarantee that our lives will be better, happier or healthier. The primitive instinct to procreate and the other strong instinct; to stay alive, occupy the humans’ minds.    It is encoded in our universal DNA even if we know we all die, eventually; and that our death is often despicable and undeserved.

We are working with persistence to develop new technologies, to make our lives easier but at the same time to destroy each other with more sophistication. We created a kind of civilisation, but it is very primitive. To be true we didn’t change as homo sapience a lot the last 10000 years. Wars, conflicts, exploitation, slavery, deceptions, envy, propaganda, jealousy and the all surrounding fear control our existence.

The best way to survive in this world it is to find your inner child and escape into that reality; hide there and wait till the end of your life.

Puella aeterna and puer eaternus are the heroes of my series entitled “Peter Pan”.  

This is not a Paradise - by Kasia Turajczyk

I think that becoming a mature person isn’t synonym for better. Definitely, it doesn’t mean better life. To stay a child for ever is only the one possible alternative to survive in this horrible world.  Contrary the physiologists arguments……..Live Long Peter Pan!  Voilà

The Loony Bin of Life - by Kasia B. Turajczyk

Francisco de Goya and his black paintings.

I owe you, my readers, an apology for such a long break from posting and writing. I have been writing but it seemed that I never finished those many articles - ideas about Witkiewicz, Wojtkiewicz, Goya, Max Ernst, Remedios Varos, the Museum of Surrealism in Vienna, Tadeusz Makowski, Mathias Grunewald and so on and so on. I can only blame my nature, my pessimism and my sluggishness or maybe idleness.

Getting older isn't a nice event in once life. I am not that old but also not young anymore.  I have become obsessed with death. I am not afraid to die. However  I am terrorized by the idea that one day I will wake up and everyone close and precious to me in this life (life for me is about people and love, not about possessions and things) will have disappeared. They will simply no longer be here, they will all be dead.  That happened to lots of humans during the second world war, it happens still in Arabia and Africa every day. It could happen to me too. Our existence on this planet is so unpredictable, often surreal and cruel.

This long preamble brings me to Francisco de Goya. Two months ago I spent a whole day in the Prado, Madrid.  Of course one day, even if it is from the opening till the closing isn't enough for the Prado. But I have my preferences, my own likes and not-likes (dislikes would be too strongly stated), being selective leaves me more time to see what I want to see.  

Prado, Spain, Madrid and my obsession with death, all that logically brings me to Goya,  of course.  Goya of the Pinturas Negras, the so-called black paintings. Goya made them in his last years in Madrid, 1820-24. He did it for himself, and only for himself.  They are murals. He painted the walls in his farmhouse -villa  “la Quinta del Sordo”, outside Madrid.  He was not working anymore for the royal family, he was free of duties. He could paint entirely and only for his own pleasure. However after seeing those works you can assume that Goya didn't paint them to express his pleasure, happiness and delight.  I would insist, that he painted them to state his anger about the political situation in Spain, his fear of death, his disappointment with humanity and maybe his pessimism and depression.  To tell the truth, nobody really knows what was his motivation to do so. All the explanations by art critics, curators and some artists are only speculations. If you would like to read some more reasonable and sensible discourse on this issue I would definitely recommend the biography of Goya written by Robert Hughes. ( I am a huge fan of Robert Hughes writing talent. )

Las Parcas - The Fates 

14 dark paintings all placed together in one large room in the Prado. What a treatment for a disturbed  and pessimistic soul - I am talking about myself. I could stay in that room in Prado the whole day just going around and admire the imagination, the artistic concept, the use of colours, the stroke of his brush and thinking about how to steal them!  Yes, I would love to have it in my own house -  probably they would make of me  a totally  medieval monk, locked in my  external hermitage of Goya's spirit. Some of the paintings are almost black/grey and brownish - some of them like Sabbath-Asmodeus or Duel with Clubs are more colourful with used of aero blue, bright iridescent red and unbleached titanium.  Most of the works are huge, from 144 cm high till 438 cm width.

Duel with Clubs

Sabbath-Asmodeus

The most famous black painting is probably Saturn Devouring His Son (it could be a daughter, though!).  The head is already consumed by Saturn as is much of the right arm. He doesn't look very pleased with this.  He looks ashamed for his horrifying act of incest and at the same time  uncontrolled.  The story of Saturn devouring his children is based actually on a Greek myth about the god Kronos, one of the Titans. Saturn is the Roman name for Kronos.  Kronos learned from his mother Gaia and his father Uranus that he was destined to be overcome by his own sons, just as he had overthrown his father. As a result, although he sired the gods Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades and Poseidon by Rhea, he devoured all of them, both the male and female, as soon as they were born to prevent the prophecy coming true. It is one of the early myth.
 http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanKronos.html

Saturn Devouring His Son

For me the most beautiful, pur sang work of art is Head of a Dog. It is so modern and contemporary that it is very difficult to conceive that it was painted almost 200 years ago. You can't just pass the painting. You can't ignore it.  It is a big canvas 134 cm x 80 cm, made in a few tones only:  diverse ochres and siennas.  There is a huge empty space and in the middle of the lower part of the image only a small protruding head of a dog.  I looked at the small sad head of the dog, and I swear I could hear his terrified yearning. The dog is totally alone, there is nobody there, and there will be nobody there. Only the almost invisible shadow of somebody, maybe a ghost. The situation is hopeless, melancholy par excellence. Of course all the paintings are amazing, made by a man who was already 74/78 years old, but still innovative and still progressing, a real genius!

Head of a Dog

I love Goya, I admire his talent, his passion, his brush stroke, his choice of colours, his work ethos, his never ending search for new media and his determination to be true to himself as an artist and as a person.

You must go and see the black paintings!

P.S.
Baron Émile d'Erlanger acquired “la Quinta” in 1873 and had the paintings transferred to canvas. The works suffered enormously in the process, losing a large amount of paint. Finally, the Baron donated these paintings to the State, and they were sent to the Prado Museum, where they have been on view since 1889.

"Heads in a landscape" is, in all probability, the fifteenth Black Painting. It became separated from the other paintings in the collection and is now in the collection of Stanley Moss in New York.(from Wikipedia)

This is not a Paradise - the realism of dreams genre

This is not a paradise.

It belongs to my "Return of Peter Pan" Series, but there is a difference with the other paintings from this series, it's much darker and more philosophical than the others.

I am back into oil. It is an absolute pleasure to smell the turpentine, the oil paints and all the chemicals I am using when working with oil. I forgot how wonderful and magnificent oil technique is. I am using the traditional method – layering and glazing. But the background of this painting is partly made using acrylics.

The symbols in the image of my work are very obvious. My poor harlequin isn't very happy, is he?
He is balancing on top of his freedom. He has two choices: selling his soul to the nasty snake or to a shiny apple. There is another choice, extreme one: the suicide. But I can see his inability to commit it.

This is not a paradise!

Odilon Redon

My first contact with Odilon Redon took place in the Museum d'Orsay in Paris in 1988. I still remember the moment when I saw a small pastel with exceptionally bright colours. "The Flower of  Blood" was the title of that work and it had something very mysterious in it that captured my attention for a long time. The flowers and the character of the female were obvious but the giant creature in the top right corner was really weird. And the colours, the colours were just amazing: clean, bright, fantastic and glowing. It was obvious that this painting was telling a mysterious story. I could stay in front of it a whole day and just escape from my physical body and the material place into totally different world. 

The Blood of Flower

Next to it was another pastel of Redon;  with a golden background and a black creature/face at the front. The title of the work was Underwater Vision.  I remembered coming back a few times to the dark part of the d'Orsay where Redon's paintings were exhibited.  I was trying to find answers to why those works captured my attention so much and what was in them different to all the other amazing paintings there. The fascinating colours, the secrets, the stories? Odilon Redon was/is one of those painters, whose works are mystical and metaphorical;  they will never really reveal their own secrets. In Redon's own words: 

"My drawings inspire and are not to be defined. They determine nothing. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous world of the undetermined. They are a kind of metaphor. I have placed there a little door opening on to the mysterious. I have made stories."

Underwater Vision 

  

Odilon Redon has been seen by some art critics as the precursor of Dada and surrealism. I don't agree with that. His work is mystical and fantastic but not strictly surreal.   His work is very individual in most of its aspects. It is as unique as the work of Botticelli, (before he became a religious fanatic), Breughel, El Greco, Vrubel or Wojtkiewicz. 

His early work, black and with drawings in charcoal, is very haunting , scary and crazy - the crying and smiling spiders, the cactus man, the bizarre creatures, they are coming straight out from bizarre and dark dreams into the perception of the recipient. His series of etchings reminds me very much of Los Chaprichos, the famous etchings by Goya.

The Spirit Forest

There is something very peculiar about Odile Redon.  Till his fifties he worked almost exclusively in black and white - charcoal drawings and lithographs. Once he passed the age of 50 he started painting and using colours - most works being made in pastels and oil. After the discovery of colours he became an remarkable colourist. I think the colours that he used undeniably inspired Chagall. The similarity in colours between the two painters are so obvious that I have to make this assumption.  

Odilon Redon remained relatively unknown until Joris-Karl Huysmans, a French writer, published his book 'A Rebours' with a passage dedicated to the art of Redon.

"Those were pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannonball with his finger; a dreadful spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance—heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top—recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium." ¹.

Most of Redon's work is in the hands of private collectors. Lots of his work can be found in Dutch museums:  Gemeentemuseum Den Hague,  Rijks Museum Kröller-Müller  in Otterlo,  Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (a big collection).  It was thanks to Andre Bonger ², who introduced Redon to Holland and to the society of La Libre Esthétique in Brussels that Odilon became extraordinarily famous in the Netherlands.

La Libre Esthétique (free aesthetics) was an artistic society founded in 1893 in Brussels to continue the efforts of the artists' group Les XX which dissolved the same year. To reduce conflicts between artists invited or excluded, artists were no longer admitted to the society, thus all exhibitors were now invited. The first annual exhibition was opened on 14 February 1894, and the exhibition of 1914 was the last.

Work by Odilon Redon has a place in my private museum of imaginary, unique and beautiful works of art.

¹.Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, translated by Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 52–53.

². Andries Bonger, nicknamed "Dries", was Johanna van Gogh-Bonger's favorite brother. Bonger was a friend of his future brother-in-law Theo van Gogh in Paris. It was through Andries that Johanna and Theo met.

Why Beauty Mattters - documentary by Roger Scruton

A few months ago we were visiting the Wellcome Collection in London, to see the exhibition entitled "Death, a self-portrait", largely collected by Richard Harris. Whilst there I enriched myself with a very small book about Beauty. I am currently reading this short philosophical introduction to the subject of beauty, written by Roger Scruton.

Beauty, Truth and Goodness, the big trinity of Plato and Plotinus. Maybe not necessarily in that sequence. Probably Truth, Goodness and Beauty is a more suitable order.

I am a kind of very idealistic pessimist, or maybe a pessimistic idealist! Even if I gave up my idealistic view about human kind I didn't give up on truth, goodness and beauty.

A long time ago I studied Socrates and Plato. I loved Plato's Dialogues. Beautifully written literature and full of wisdom. Plato argued powerfully for objectivity. Plato opposed relativism. He criticized the views of the sophist Protagoras in his dialogue Thaetetus. In a paraphrased dialogue, the philosopher Socrates argued that relativism is self-defeating as follows:

"My opinion is: Truth must be absolute and that you Mr. Protagoras, are absolutely in error. Since this is indeed my opinion, then you must concede that it is true according to your philosophy." 

We are living in a time in which we question everything, everything is relative, everything is impossible and everything is possible.

In Ancient Greece Plato opposed relativism, and he criticized the views of the sophist Protagoras.

Today Einstein would be astonished if he suddenly arose from the underworld and discovered the impact his Theory of Relativity has had upon artists, musicians, writers, in fact the whole art world in the XX century.

Maybe I should blame Einstein and not Duchamp for the destruction and death of the quality, the beauty and the mastery in ART?

Yesterday I discovered a documentary "Why Beauty Matters" by Roger Scruton, the author of my little book. I want to share with you this fascinating and thought-provoking documentary.

But beauty still matters even for the contemporary artists. Gottfried Helnwein's paintings are an excellent exemplar of that. Super-realistic with a touch of magic. Maybe the most talented master of today!

Gottfired Helnwein  - The Murmur of the Innocents 6  2009

 

Animation -"Much Ado About How To Become A Famous Artist"

This post is an exception. It is not about surreal art but it is about the contemporary art scene that has become surreal.

I find (and I think) most of the art work currently presented in contemporary art galleries, art shows and modern art museums very much alienated, exhausted, recessive and fake.

I still think that mastery, technique and talent are more important than the contemporary concept that “expressing yourself” is all that counts. Everybody can express their own feelings in their own particular way. You don’t have to be “fine artist”, you don’t have to have any “technique”. Following that principle everyone is an artist as long as they “express themselves”. But is that ART? I don’t want art to be elitist, but art should be about the truth, the good and the beautiful. And yes, there are some objective criteria for these categories.

This animation movie (my first)is a humorous view of the modern contemporary art scene in the XXI century. It is based on my experiences as a female fine artist, a painter who loves quality and mastery, and above all the Truth and the Beautiful.

I wrote the whole script for the movie and produced the animation together with Nikolaus Cieslinski. The movie was made in cooperation with the VisionLore Group, a Polish animation company. They designed the visual characters.


 

Tomasz Sętowski, his house and his Dream Factory.

For all the fans of Tomasz Sętowski I have something to share with you about the private life of the great artist. I found this information by accident whilst searching the web. Almost a year ago a Polish local paper from Częstochowa (it is Sętowski's city) posted an article and photos about the place where he is living. The article is in Polish but the images are in a universal language. 

Here is the link: Tomasz Setowski and his house

A short summary of the article: Tomasz Sętowski lives in Stradom, a district of Częstochowa. He lives there with his wife, son and Mona, the dog. Their house is a private sanctuary; only for them and their closest friends. He lives in a house which may not be big enough in area but is overflowing with history.

The house belonged to a well known artist, Marian Michalik, who was also Sętowski's teacher. In his paintings Michalik used the technique of the XVII century Dutch masters of still life, giving the images a touch of magic realism. Over the last few years Sętowski has become known worldwide as one of the most prominent representatives of the style called "Magical Realism". Before that he was just categorised as a surreal painter. There are only a few painters belonging to this Magical Realism subgroup of surrealism who can paint like Sętowski, faultlessly and with masterly technique.

Tomasz Setkowski in his Dream Factory.

Tomasz Sętowski has his own gallery/studio called The Museum of Imagination in Częstochowa. The address of his Dream Factory is ul.Oławska 2; 42-200 Częstochowa, Poland
phone: +48 (34) 366 66.

Hereby some wonderful images of his work - all of them are gouaches.
Most of the titles of these images has been translated by myself. Some of the translations of the images on Sętowski's website are not good in my humble opinion.

Awaiting  Inspiration

The Enchantress Of Dreams

The Rider of Time

Penelope

What Is Going On On This Planet

Giorgio Chirco contra Giorgio Chirico

Giorgio De Chirico was once, for a short period of his life, an absolutely amazing pre-surreal painter. One of the pioneers of the magical, dreamy and captivating world of imagination in his highly original paintings. His work was very different, and unique for the time in which he created it. Even today if you are in the Tate Modern, or in other museums which have De Chirico's paintings in their collections, you will always immediately recognize his paintings but only those from the 'surreal period'. Even Breton loved him and admired him. This in itself was already a miracle, because as both rumours and facts tell us Breton was a real tyrant and he didn't like anybody. In Paris from 1911 to the outbreak of war De Chirico developed his 'Metaphysical painting': a self consciously enigmatic type of picture clearly inviting Freudian forms of interpretation. As he expressed himself in written text somewhere between 1911 and 1915:

To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream. Profound statement must be drawn by the artist form the most secret recesses of his being; there no murmuring torrent, no birdsong, no rustle of leaves can distract him.

A few year later De Chirico deserted the new movement, actually all the avant-garde of his time, and become obsessed with the old masters, with the technical methods especially of earlier Italian painters. He abandoned his metaphysical - surreal - enigmatic style and became a classical painter. In his own words, written in 1919:

The neglect of anthropomorphic representation, and the deformation of it, encouraged entire legion of painters to turn out stupid and facile reproductions. With its return the problem of animal-man looms larger and more terrible than ever, since, this time, the right weapons to confront it are lacking, or rather they are in existence, but they are blunt, and many have forgotten how to use them. ...... To return to the craft! This will not be easy and will demand time and toil. The schools and the masters are deficient, or rather they are vilified by the colouristic riot that has invaded Europe in this half-century. The academies exist, full of methods and systems, but, alas, what results they produce! What on earth would the weakest student of 1600 say if he could see a masterpiece by a professore of an Italian academy, or by a cher maǐtre of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Paris?

Back to the old De Chirico from the Metaphysical paintings:

It is most important that we should rid art of all that is has contained or recognizable material to date, all familiar subject-matter, all traditional ideas, all popular symbols must be banished forthwith. More important still we must hold enormous faith in ourselves: it is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means absolutely nothing from the logical point of view (... ) should speak so strongly to us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint...

What a contrast and contradiction to his ideas from a few years later:

This is the point we have reached. This is the state of confusion, ignorance and overwhelming stupidity in the midst of which the very few painters whose brains are clear and whose eyes are clean are preparing to return to pictorial science following the principles and teaching of our old masters. Their first lesson was drawing, drawing, the divine art, the foundation of every plastic construction, skeleton of every good work, eternal law that every artifice must follow. Drawing, ignored, neglected and deformed by all modern painters....

Somehow after the First World War De Chirico returned to tradition and mastery. He summed it nicely:

I am calm, and I decorate myself with three words that I wish to be the seal of all my work: Pictor classicus sum.*

Everyone can change and everyone has the right to do so. Unfortunately in the case of De Chirico his decision to reject his enigmatic style of painting, from the point of view of art history, wasn't such a good decision. Nobody really is interested in his work from the neo-classicism period. De Chirico wasn't really consequent in abandoning his most successful style, soon after 1920 he begun faking his own early work.

 In 1926 he created a work which now belongs to the Tate Modern collection entitled 'The Painter's Family'.

'The Painter's Family' by De Chirico - 1926

The painting was made in the 'metaphysical' style. He only did it for money, probably. But the work misses the enigmatic, the melancholic and the somehow depressive aspects of his early work. The Tate Modern owns two more paintings: the first 'The Uncertainty of Poet' is from 1913 and the second 'The Melancholy of Departure' from 1916.

 'The Uncertainty of Poet' by De Chirico 1913

'The Melancholy of Departure' by De Chirico 1916

* I am a classical painter


Another post about De Chirico:
Enigmatic poet of nostalgia - De Chirico

Salvador Dali and his nymphomaniac wife .

According to a short editorial in New Scientist (2 February 2013) Salvador Dali had a very unorthodox albeit very simple method of mental refreshment.

He would sit with a key in one hand, poised above a metal plate placed on the floor, and let sleep take him. As soon as he began to slumber in earnest, the key would slip from his fingers and clang against the plate - waking him immediately.

Dali declared that this method provided all the rest he needed before getting on with a new painting . It seems to me that he probably was in the stage 2 of his sleep. Because this is the perfect stage for naps. Lasting 20 minutes or so, it restores fatigued muscles and replenishes alertness. Confirm the science of sleep if you are awakened during this stage, you will feel refreshed and happy. But it is very impossible that you will have dreams during this stage. The majority of dreams happens after the stage 4 of deep sleep in REM stage. I often put down my dreams on paper, in writing or drawings. I memorise and repeat them time after time to prevent them escaping from my unconscious memory before they are printed in my conscious memory. Of course I only bother with the most unusual, impossible, shocking or surreal dreams. The content of Dali's paintings has probably nothing to do with his dreams, in contradiction to the widely repeated truisms:

'What inspired Salvador Dali? - his dreams and his wife'.

The first answer is a nonsensical one, the second is a true one. His wife Gala was not only a huge inspiration for his paintings but also a gigantic, dominating force behind his productions, his popularity and his ultimate fate as a fallen genius. Think about it: Dali was a master painter, with his absolutely amazing, conscientious techniques; with his vulnerability behind his moustache; with his genuine spirituality; with his homosexual inclinations; without his wife, without Gala!

I can imagine all the great paintings he would have made were it not for the devil woman - His wife. Maybe he would have only been discovered posthumously  but for the greatness of his art, and art in general, who cares about that? Dali as a brilliant genius and as a serious artist existed between 1929 and 1939. Full stop. After that period Dali's commercial success, huge as it was, coincided with his decline as a serious artist. Full stop!

Here are some of his best paintings. I didn't include his best painting 'The Persistence of Memory' from 1931 only because I couldn't find a good image of it on WWW. I do have a few books included this painting but they are too big for my scanner.

Sorry for that. You can find a good image of this painting at Wikpedia.

Another excellent work is the Morphological Echo - consisting of two oil on panel paintings made between 1934 and 1936. Hereby the two images:

Lugubrious Game - 1929

 

Surreal and beautiful – from Tuskany

I spent my last birthday in Tuscany. It was the perfect environment for my spirit and my turbulent brain which has lost confidence and hope in contemporary art. After seeing all the amazing mediaeval art in the Uffizi in Florence and in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Siena I came to a conclusion that can be seen as a controversial one. My conclusion is that contemporary art has lost connection to beauty and the sacred. Another very important aspect is the craftsmanship. A huge percentage of contemporary art colleges' students can’t draw or paint. They are missing the talent and the techniques. The only thing that they are able to do is to express their own ideas or feelings. There is no beauty and the sacred element is missing. On the other hand art is an act of expression, so perhaps I am wrong. Maybe contemporary art is the expression of contemporary people/artists who have lost any connection with the beautiful and the sacred?! Mass culture, popular culture, deception, profit and popularity. The flow of information is so overwhelming - we don't have time for deep study or reflection. It is about sloppiness and dullness. That is a good characterisation of XXI century art: asexual and shallow. Sometimes I think that one of the last bastions of excellent technique, beauty and the sacred are the surreal artists, and of course the practitioners of traditional fine art, too. 

While in Tuscany we did of course visit San Gimignano. What an enchanted and magical place. One of the museums that we went to was the Museum Archeologico and Spezieria Di Santa Fina. The Museo Archeologico is a relatively new attraction in San Gimignano and home to an array of artefacts from the town's past. The Spezieria di Santa Fina - Apothecary of Santa Fina - includes a reconstruction of a pharmacy from the 16th century and is filled with fragrant herbs and spices. There is also a planted herb garden and an additional modern art gallery. In that gallery I found two (actually more) very interesting surreal paintings. The first is entitled 'La Finestra Sull'Arno' from 2011 by Renzo Galardini. According Google translate La Finestra Sull'Arno means 'The window on the Arno'. I think the better translation is 'The window over the Arno'. (The Arno is a river in the Tuscany/Florence. It is the most important river of central Italy after the Tiber). I had never heard about this artist before. Thanks to the wonders of the World Wide Web and the internet I found some information about him.

Renzo Galardini was born in Pisa, January 14, 1946, and now lives in Cecina near there today in a restored 15th century building. He studied at the Art Institute of Lucca, graduating in 1962. He accepted a teaching position there, and at the same time, he studied scenography at the Fine Art Academy in Florence. During these years, he conducted research and restoration of medieval ceramics. Galardini's work as an artist encompasses oil paintings, ceramics and graphics. The Italian masters influence his painting technique. He applies oil pigments meticulously, harmonizing the colours, creating works of great elegance. Having earned privileged access to Tuscan museums and archival collections, Galardini often incorporates images of ancient armaments, clothing, tools, weaponry and special implements in his works. The richness of his execution and the depiction of his unique subjects in their highly theatrical settings create his unique and highly identifiable style. His graphic work, considered by various critics to be the best in today's Italy, is featured in a number of international publications and in a recent monograph by Nicola Miceli - Renzo Galardini: Incisioni.

I think what really attracted me to this painting was the richness of the subjects, the colours, the excellent technique and the great elegance. An absolutely fabulous painting with a hint of the surreal about it. I also see in it associations with and reminiscences from the late mediaeval/ early renaissance. I do see also a hint of Breughel the Elder. It is a very captivating image; there are so many questions and so few answers. Who are the bizarre soldiers climbing and struggling by the bridge? Who is this weird fat, naked creature sitting on the edge of the parapet or platform? Is this Florence? What about the puppet without a head and the rocking horse? 

Here is the image, see for yourself:

La Finestra Sull'Arno' from 2011 by Renzo Galardini.

La Finestra Sull'Arno' from 2011 by Renzo Galardini-detail

The second painting is more in the style of the German artists: Otto Dix and George Grosz. The work's title is almost unreadable, but seems to say 'La statuaire'. I hope that the name of the artist is correct - Stefano Cacchi. Maybe not. My photo of the text is really poor, but it is my fault. I should check the quality of the image immediately after taking it. Here is the image. Isn't it wonderful? The flying protectives, the French president (De Gaulle?), the mad cartoon like bunnies alias political puppets, the British Queen, the unstable world political arena and the fire of war. I really love it. 

Salvador Dali on "What's My Line?", his books and "Un Chien Andalou"

Once upon a time there were a group of people whose dream was to set other people free. The dream, the unreal, the subconscious were the instruments for this. As Andre Breton explained in his first Manifesto:

The mere word freedom is the only one that still excites me. I deem it capable of indefinitely sustaining the old human fanaticism.It doubtless satisfies my only legitimate aspiration. Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery — even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness — is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself.

(Translation by R.Swaver and H.R. Lane) 

Probably one of the first visual manifestos of Surrealism was the short movie 'Un Chien Andalou' directed by Luis Buñuel and written by him and Salvador Dali.



Through their accomplishment with Un Chien Andalou, Dalí and Buñuel became the first filmmakers to be officially welcomed into the ranks of the Surrealists by the movement's leader André Breton.

I mentioned once that Breton was a kind of dictator of Surrealism. He was like a pope, he cursed and excommunicated. He was immune to most of the sins, except for pride and lust. In contrast to the other surreal artists he had no sense of humour, he was a deadly serious man.

 Dali, for almost 40 years, has been the most famous painters alive. Not only as a surreal painter but as a visual artist in general. I have a kind of weird relationship with Dali's art. I love his techniques. He is a genius painter, old master quality. He created the most amazing and shocking paintings. I love his art made between 1929 till 1939. After that he become a slave of his wife Gala, and a caricature of himself. He become a brand with his bodily trademark, the moustache (not really original, adopted from portrait of Philip IV by Velásquez.)

Here in the short video you can watch Dali live, still in good shape, on American TV in a 'What's My Line' show from 1952.

'What's My Line' was a panel show in which 4 celebrities had to work out the occupations of a series of invited guests. This show originally ran in the United States on the CBS Television Network from 1950 to 1967. Here is one of the early shows with Salvador Dali as a guest.


 


If you are a collector or interested in books about, illustrated by or featuring the art of Dali, here is a link to an blog about all of those things : http://dalibookcollector.blogspot.co.uk/p/books-illustrated-by-dali.html

Liebster Award!

I totally forgot to mention that I was nominated for a Liebster Award. I also forgot to thank Miguel for such a nice recognition of my hard work and hours spent to make this blog as good as possible.

Miguel who has an excellent blog - http://storberose.blogspot.pt/- about literature in general and Portuguese Literature in English, nominated me for the Liebster Blog Award along with 4 other bloggers who have excellent and unusual blogs, but less than 200 readers/followers.

I was really happy with this recognition and although it is not a real award and it will change nothing in my life, it made my day. I don't post every day because I am busy with so many things and English is not my first or second or even third language. Therefore it costs me more time to write the post, but when I do it it is very often about totally new, marvellous artists (for most of you) or about unusual topics connected to surreal, magical and fantastic art.

Thank you Miguel!

I promise to write more. At the moment I have 5 really interesting posts to finish. One is about a, for the most of you unknown, Austrian-German painter from XX century, who had such an incredible talent and made most unusual, fantastic, magical etchings. His work will really surprise you.

Another is about one of the top contemporary surreal painters - Jaroslaw Kukowski.

Jaroslaw Kukowski - two of his famous paintings. 

Another two are about Siena, Sienese art and painters. Last June when in Siena I discovered a few surreal works made in XIII/XIV century. It totally blew me away.
The last post is about an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London - Poetry and Dream. The whole concept is a kind of nonsense, tightly stretched but nevertheless there are two De Chirico's there.

Now, I have to nominate five other blogs which, like mine, have less than 200 followers. And here the problems begin for me. I don't know enough blogs with excellent content with less than 200 followers. I can only think about one blog that I mention here below.
If you have any suggestion about interesting blogs about art, literature, politics, history, science or other issues, who have enriched the blogosphere and deserve more recognition, visits and linking, please let me know.

Here is the first blog:
http://econnexus.org/blog/  - A brilliant, excellently written blog that aims to enlighten people about "The Ecological/Economic Nexus"; what the Economist magazine calls "the challenges posed by the “three Fs”—food, fuel and the financial credit crunch" and to help provide solutions to those challenges. It also provide information on what we as individuals can do to help alleviate these problems.

"Dancing Queen" from the Blueberry Land

This happened on the sixth blueberry rainy day. Blueberryess was so fed up with the blueberryish rain, that she decided to do something very weird and totally unexpected. She wished to do something new, something that she had never done before. First she climbed her way up to the top of the Blueberry House of Surprise. The House was a museum and an archive where all the old rubbish from the blueberry kingdom was kept. You could come across items as common as old egg shells or stumble upon broken pieces of an ancient Berry Ming Dynasty vase. Nobody ever went in there except for the lonely Bleuchamp, the Artist, looking for inspiration for his next piece of never - finished art work.

 Blueberryess noticed a beautiful looking book. She got really interested in it, not just because of the way it looked but also because it was huge. It was a photo album of the Humans who ate Blueberries just like herself. It took her a lot of effort to open the giant book; the cover page was very heavy. When she finally managed to open it, she read, on the first page, the text “The most beautiful Gothic Cathedrals in the world” (Blueberress is a polyglot, she knows 121 different dialects). She started looking at the photos, the next Gothic Cathedral was more beautiful and more extraordinary then the last one. When she came to page 37, what she looked upon totally stunned her. It was a building so beautiful and so intricate in its construction that it looked unreal. It was the Cathedral in Siena, in Italy. Poor Blueberryess, for what she saw totally knocked her off her feet. She lay down on the Photo of the Cathedral, opened her eyes as wide as she could, and tried to suck the beauty of the Cathedral out of the photograph. After a while she closed her eyes and started sucking the sense of the Cathedral through her nose. Her dreams totally took control of her. But Blueberryess would not be Blueberryess if she did not start to turn her dreams into reality. She stood up, and then fell back. She was so totally committed to the idea that she had to find a way to get to see the Cathedral. She was in another state of mind. She did not watch her step and tripped on something rectangular. This rectangular thing had a window, and inside that a spool. As she kicked this thing with her leafy foot, the thing made a sound loud enough to make her fall backwards. She fell onto something soft. She looked at what it was that helped her break her fall. It was magic mushrooms. She was so hungry that she started eating them.

 The mushrooms, the music and the words that came out of the rectangular thing “...You can dance, Friday night and the lights are low, night is young and you are the dancing Queen, young and sweet, only seventeen, dancing Queen........you can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life and when you get the chance......dancing Queen… “ put her in the weirdest state.

She was still in this condition when Blueberryer found her. When he first came upon her he thought “Again, she has eaten those mushrooms”. He had stems hanging down on the ends of some beans in his hands. He did not have to think long about it; he wrapped one end of the stems around Blueberryess's hands and the other end around his own hand. He thought to himself. “Whatever happens, at least I have got her tied up and under my control”. And he did have her under control, but of course only physically. Her mind and soul where far away from anyone’s control, she was inaccessible. She was the Dancing Queen in the enchanted world of Sieneses golden Madonnas, angels, San Francesco and all her mystical and mesmerizing dreams.

Dancing Queen from the Blueberry Land Series by  Kasia  B.T. 

Dancing Queen - details 

                                         

Catch me if you can!

Catch me if you can - acrylics on canvas by Kasia B.Turajczyk

Once upon a time there was a forest, and some trees, and a bridge, and water, and a reflection in that water, i.e. an optical illusion.

A mysterious light, a surreal ambience, slightly unrealistic, a bit “horrorific” (sic!).

Then the eye was created. An All-Seeing and All-Knowing Eye. A Protecting Eye, a Reasoning Eye – but also a rebuking, twisted and unpredictable eye.

Then on the other side a planet was born. But is that a living planet? It is an unknowable fact. It is a big mystery. This planet is motionless. The far side is always dark and inaccessible.

Then in the end THEY came. What do they want? I will not be the one to betray their secret. If you want to know, go and talk to them, q.v.

They are still there, I checked again recently. They even tried to communicate with me. Unfortunately my currently very muddy brain couldn’t understand them. I blame the depression, the rain and fog.

I am not sure if you will be able to see them, it seems to me that they like to play ‘hide and seek’. They are not afraid of me, perhaps because I made them. Nonetheless they don’t want me to take liberties with them. I think they are right, by the way. I could asphyxiate them with my nihilism.

P.S. When you arrive at the car park of Lawrence Castle in the Haldon Forest Park do not follow the path of your scarcely sufficient imagination. Instead close your eyes and start using quantum entanglement to traverse the distance between you and them. Find the bridge and wait until the deepest mystery of THEIR being is revealed. Of course this will only be possible if you are honest, brave and beautiful (inside).

Hans Memling and his Last Judgment

I started this post last September in Gdansk and then I forgot about it. It ended as a draft. However I thought that you should know about that beautiful medieval altar triptych by Hans Memling which can be admired in a museum in Gdansk.

 Here is the old post, with some adjustments.

We are in Gdansk at the moment. Yesterday we went to the National Museum of Art in Gdansk to see the Last Judgment by Hans Memling. I couldn't take my eyes off this beautiful, fresh and colourful piece of fine art. It is a triptych, an altar. It is a very civilized image of heaven, purgatory and hell. The central panel shows Jesus sitting in Judgment on the world, while St Michael the Archangel is weighing souls and sending the damned to the Hell.

The triptych has an interesting past. It was commissioned by Angelo Tani, an agent of the Medici in Bruges. It was originally designed for the Florentine Church of Badia of Fiesole. During shipment to Italy the galleon San Matteo was captured by a privateer
(colloquialism for pirate), Paul Beneke from Gdansk in Poland (during the division of spoils) . The pirate ship’s owners donated the triptych to the St. Mary Church in Gdansk. A lengthy lawsuit against the Hanseatic League demanded its return to Italy, but without success. In the time of Napoleon’s supremacy the triptych was stolen again and went to the Louvre as spoils of war. After Napoleon was defeated it was removed to Berlin. In 1817 returned to Gdansk again. At the end of the Second World War Memling’s work was moved again, this time to the Reich (Germany), but not for long. The Red Army captured it and the triptych went to Leningrad to become a showpiece in the Hermitage. After Stalin’s death the Last Judgment returned to Gdansk. The original altar piece is now in the National Museum of Art. In St. Mary’s Church you can admire a copy.

So here we are between Hell , Purgatory and Heaven. The GREAT TRIO of Catholic dogmas.

Nota bene I don't believe in H.P.H.  I do believe that hell, purgatory and heaven is here and now. And H.P.H. are how you live your life.  

The whole triptych

St Michael the Archangel

A short note about Hans Memling. He was born in Hessen (Germany today) , went to Brussels and spent some time in the atelier of Rogier van der Weyden (who belongs to the school of Flemish primitives). Around 1465 he went to Bruges. From the 1460s until the end of his life he became one of the leading artists, painting both portraits and several large religious works, continuing the style he learned in his youth from his master. He worked in the tradition and style of the Flemish primitives.

The adventure with an Ocean Monster and a Blueberry Angel.

My third painting from the Blueberry-land Series.

Blueberryer and Blueberryess have found themselves in a tangled situation again.

Against all advice, Blueberryess jumped into the ocean because she wanted to know what she could find deep down in the black water. After that Blueberryer as a true gentlemen had no other option than to take a deep breath and jump into the ocean too. He did take the jump on his bike though. Of course he had a choice. To forget his Blueberryess and go for a wonderful bike ride in the “magnifique” Blueberry valley, sipping slowly the elegant Blueberry Cocktail at the top of the Blueberry Hill and enjoying the marvellous view over Blueberry Land. But as a victim of his own conception of his greatness, he had no other option than to jump into the black waters of that ocean. Or maybe it was true love?

This time only a miracle could help them. Blueberryess was swept swiftly into the Ocean Monster’s maw, and Bluberryer following her on his bike did almost the same. Suddenly out of the nothingness a Blueberry Angel appeared close to the monster. Would he be able to rescue the two reckless Blueberries?

Michael Sowa and his pigs.

Pork Soup by Michael Sowa 

One of my favourite imaginary, kind of surreal films is  Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s  Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. Widely knows as  Amélie. Above Amélie bed in her bedroom are hanging pictures/ prints of Michael Sowa. One of the pictures is "Fowl with Pearls" and another is 'Filmhoud".  Michael Sowa is a German surrealist illustrator and painters. He belongs to the most noted  illustrators in Germany. A wider public got aware of him through his illustrations for Axel Hacke’s publications. He used a pseudonym Heinz Obein.

In 1995 Michael Sowa was awarded with the Olaf-Gulbransson-Preis, in 2004 he received the Berlin Bookprice in the category Children’s Books for ‘Prinz Tamino’. Besides many book projects he works for newspapers such as Die Zeit and The New Yorker.

His work has been exhibited in the Wilhelm-Busch-Museum Hannover, in the Kunsthalle Oldenburg, at The Liebenweintrum in Burghausen and repetedly in Japan. In 2009 his 130 works were show in Japan, in Tokyo,   Kyoto and Yokohama.

His works/ imagination has something similar with René  Magritte's work. There is one fundamental difference between them, Sowa is a better painter (qua technique) than Magritte.  Magritte was more illustrator than painter. His paintings are really badly made from the point of view of an perfectionist- painter par excellent like me.

I have been trying to find some more personal/ biographical information about Michael Sowa but couldn't really find a lot about him. He was born in 1945 in Berlin, finished Art Pedagogic College. His name is a Polish one. Sowa means Owl in Polish.

There is a book available on Amazon entitled Sowa's Ark, with a collection of  over fifty farm animal-centric images.

A miniature pig splashes around in a bowl of soup; a duck leads a wheelbarrow down a lane; a woman gently strokes her daughter's face with a live rabbit in a dimly lit room. This work provides a journey into the imagination of artist Michael Sowa where a menagerie of bizarre animals take on complex personae. Using rich textures and inventive techniques of paint and varnish, these pictures achieve the otherworldly look of a surrealist fairy tale. -  From Amazon description 

His work is full of eccentric, humours, bizarre, fabulous stories most of them about animals. I love paintings which tell stories. His technique is 'magnifique'.

Here is the cover of his book from Amazon.



 I just order Sowa's Ark. Soon I will post more about him.

Below are some images of his paintings, which I really like.

School of Fish 

The Bear by Michael Sowa

Flying Pig by Michael Sowa

2012 Calendar - Betelgeuse and Mintaka

2012 Calendar

Betelgeuse and Mintaka Calendar

From my Series Blueberryland

Blueberryland – The adventure in the Blueberry Hole

Blueberryland is full of unpredictable and unexpected phenomena.

The Adventure in the Blueberry Hole - acrylics on canvas 40 cm x 40 cm
by Kasia B.Turajczyk

 Just when Blueberryer and Blueberryess wanted to go for a nice, evening walk suddenly out of the blue a golden and blue hole opened its mouth and both of them were taken into a new adventure. Maybe they could even wake up in a new Universe? Can they survive inside the blueberry hole? Is there a way to escape from it? Is the blueberry hole less dangerous than an ordinary black hole? Can Blueberryer rescue his Blueberryess without his Golden bike?

A detail from The Adventure in the Blueberry Hole

A great trio from the past - surreal female artists: Remedios Varo, Kati Horn and Leonora Carrington.

Before June 15, 2011 I had never heard about Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington or Kati Horna. It just so happened that I had been reading about Leonora Carrington in Time magazine (June 13, 2011) in the Milestones section. She had passed away at the age of 94. Not that I knew Leonora Carrington very well. But because she was a partner to Max Ernst and I am a big fan of his art it made me curious about hers. I decided to begin a search for this female surrealist painter, sculptor and writer; very much unknown to me. First I went through all my books about surrealism, about modern art history. I found nothing. I searched in the books that I posses about Max Ernst, nothing either. The next step was getting online of course.  I wanted to discover more about her and her art work. Most of the posts I could find online mentioned her death. Independent, Guardian, Telegraph all the papers were telling the story about Britain's lost and unknown great surrealist painter. “English surrealist painter and sculptor regarded as a national treasure in Mexico” (from The Guardian). Within her own family, Leonora Carrington was rarely mentioned, the rebel who had run off to be an artist’s model. But when Joanna Moorhead tracked down her long-lost cousin in Mexico, her eyes were opened to the extraordinary story of the last surviving member of the great Surrealists (from the Daily Telegraph). And so on and so on.

I went to Amazon and did a search for surreal female artists. I ordered three books which were available about female surreal artists. One is an album including paintings of most surreal female artists. The other two are wonderfully written and illustrated books. One is a biography about Remedios Varo (maybe more about her artistic achievement) written by Janet A. Kaplan. The last one is about the friendship and artistic creation of three surreal artists from European backgrounds who all lived and worked in Mexico. I discovered that Leonora Carrington had two very good friends in Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. Remedios Varo was a surreal artist and writer like Leonora Carrington herself. Kati Horna was an exceptionally brilliant photographer.  Kati Horna as well as Remedios Varo were/are incredibly original and talented artists. They are as great as Max Ernst, Man Ray, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, Meret Oppenheim or Andre Masson, Paul Klee or Rene Magritte (who by the way wasn’t really a good painter – he was a great illustrator). They are absolutely better than Frida Kahlo (from my point of view).

From the great trio: Carrington, Horna and Varo; works of Remedios Varo and Kati Horna speek/ convince me most.

Kati Horna, Stairway to the Cathedral, photo-montage; Spain 1937

Remedios Varo, Harmony, 1956, oil on masonite.

Remedios Varo, Phenomenon of Weightlessnes, 1963; oil on canvas

The book about Remedios Varo included almost all her work. I fell in love immediately with her paintings. They are amazingly mysterious, scientifically imaginary, mathematically sophisticated and aesthetically absolutely beautiful.
You can probably imagine my feeling of embarrassment, surprise and disbelief that not even in one of the thousands books about art that I own could I find even one mention of her. After seeing her incredibly original art I felt kind of stupid and ashamed that I didn’t know Remedios Varo before. Expect lots of posts about her in the near future from me……..maybe even tomorrow!