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.
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).
This is the first painting from the surreal/fantastic series 'The Blueberry Lovers'. We have a boy called Blueberryer and a girl called Blueberryess. They are very much in love. But Blueberry Land is full of sophisticated robots, dangerous insects, unforeseen and unpredictable phenomena. Blueberry Land is also a land of mad scientists with their insane but at the same time brilliant inventions. The Quantum Blueberry Land.
This is the beginning of their story:
There is a golden night in Blueberry Land. The Blueberryer is cycling on his golden bike. He is in a hurry; he is worried about his Blueberryess. She is hidden in a golden cage. She was hidden there by a vicious Spider-witch. The witch wants to suck the delicious blueberry sweet-scented juicy life from the Blueberryess. Can the Blueberry Biker arrive in time to rescue his lover? Can they live together happily ever after in Blueberry Land?
"Blueberry Biker on his way to his lover hidden in a golden cage"
Own technique on canvas, 40 cm x 40 cm; 2011 (sold)
Maybe I should not post to this blog my own work, and I should not write about it either.
But in this case I can’t resist it. I think this painting has something fantastic, something enigmatic and mysterious.
After a few years spent reading and watching and doing research about fantastic and fantasy art and all the genres in between I am coming more and more to understand and recognise all the boundaries and confusions between and about fantasy art and the fantastic elements in art. In his famous book "Au coeur du fantastique" Roger Caillos said that fantasy is secret and mysterious . I am not sure he was right about that. There are lots of paintings in the fantasy art genre which are full of fantastic elements and full of weird and crazy imaginary creatures with absolutely no mysterious or secret ambience what so ever. It could be just the problem of the onomastics or the semantic. I don’t know since I can’t ask Caillos any more precisely what he meant when he used mystery and secret as synonyms for fantasy.
Back to my painting “The Blueberry Fantasy”; which I categorised as a mysterious painting and I am not only the one. All the people who have seen it found The Blueberry Fantasy a very surrealistic and secret work. Every time someone looks at it they find new mysterious creatures, shapes and shadows. And people love it. As proud as I am (read it as sarcasm) I present my mysterious paintings amongst all the other great works by famous painters.
Voila!
“The Mockery of Human Follies” is one of those mysterious paintings that don’t allow me to stop thinking about them. In the first place because it is an excellent art work (in my humble opinion) and in the second place (maybe it should be the first place) because it is a satirical-moralistic-fantastic painting in the Medieval tradition. And I am addicted to medieval art.
My first impression of the painting is that it is a realistic-satirical work a’la Breugel. I see a scene of the life of peasants in a village, with a wonderful renaissance landscape in the background. But then I discover all the unusual things. The faces of the pictured people are odd, some of the ugly, some of them not, but almost everyone is smiling. And the smile isn’t an innocent, nice smile; it is definitely a rascally-devilish smile. There are lots of strange scenes, unexpected moments, shows and associations in this painting. I see lots of resemblance with Erasmus famous book “Lof der Zotheid” (In Praise of Folly, in English). Erasmus used words to describe the folly of humans; the painter of “The mockery of humans follies” used the language of the colours of his paints.
The Dorotheum in Vienna attributed the painting to Frans Verbeeck. He belonged together with Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Breugel and Adriaen Brouwer to the group of the XVI century Flemish painters who painted satirical-moralising work. The fantasy and satire go hand in hand in lots of pictures, drawings, carvings, decorations, sculptures, miniatures, illuminated manuscripts in the art work of the medieval time. The Flemish painters did not have to invent all the monstrous creatures by themselves. They could fall back on a rich and broad collection of peculiar species, exotic monsters and extremely weird people from the medieval artists. What they probably did was add some new symbols, pictures of farmers and poor people, and of course lots of hidden eroticism behind the realistic scenes.
Frans Verbeeck is mentioned in the book written by Carel van Mander about important Netherlands and German painters. The book was written probably in the XVI century. Carel van Mander died in 1606. The first edition is from 1764. Frans Verbeeck was born and worked in Mechelen in Belgium. He died in 1570, but we don’t know his date of birth. His paintings can be admired in the Centre for Old Art 't Vliegend Peert in Mechelen in Belgium.
The painting, “The Mockery of Human Follies” was for sale in 2007 at an auction by Dorotheum in Vienna. The guide price was between €65.000 and €75.000. It was sold of course. I would love to have the painting on my own wall, look at it every day, discover new stories, hidden metaphors, hidden symbols. I'm still trying to work out the significance of the tiny people present in such numbers. Are they us? And are the huge people the gods playing with us? laughing at us? or it is just us, the human species playing with other humans? Please let me know if you have any more information about this painting. My curiosity requires answers!
The notion of vampirism has existed for millennia; cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Hebrews, Ancient Greeks, and Romans had tales of demons and spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. However, despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity we know today as the vampire originates almost exclusively from early 18th century South-Eastern Europe, when verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published. In most cases, vampires are revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but they can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or by being bitten by a vampire. Belief in such legends became so pervasive that in some areas it caused mass hysteria and even public executions of people believed to be vampires. (Info: Wiki)
The most beautiful vampire was without doubt Lilith from the painting by John Collier, 1892. The most gorgeous, seductive, full blood vampire!
The mythical Lilitu was probably born in the story tales in the ancient Babylonia. Lilitu was considered a demon and was often depicted as subsisting on the blood of babies. However, the Jewish counterparts were said to feast on men and women, as well as newborns.
Who was the most famous vampire?
I guess the “Little Dragon” alias Dracula. It means also the son of dragon or devil. In real he was a nobleman, a prince, father of three sons. Vlad III was as prince maintained an independent policy in relation to the Ottoman Empire, and in Romania, he is viewed by many historicises as a prince with a deep sense of justice and a defender of Wallachia (part of Hungary) against Ottoman expansionism. His absurdly cruel punishments earn him the nickname in later years of Vlad the Impaler, which echoed the mode of death that would destroy the legendary Count Dracula.
In the English-speaking world, Vlad III is best known for inspiring the name of the eponymous vampire in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. Stoker came across the name Dracula in a history book- which mistranslated it as “Wallachian for devil”- and substituted it for his character’s original name, Count Wampyr. I wonder or the English would have been happy if the people of Wallachia had painted Queen Victoria as a very cruel, despotic, imperialistic witch. Probably not.
