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.

"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).

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

The enigmatic poet of Nostalgia and Melancholia:Giorgio De Chirico; Part II

Click here for part I  of De Chirico the enigmatic poet.

In Paris from 1911 until the outbreak of the First World War Giorgio de Chirico developed his ‘metaphysical painting’.  Those artworks are very enigmatic, self-consciously enigmatic. There is lots of inspiration and influence from mythology, philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis and probably his own experience. De Chirico was born in Greece in 1888 from Italian parents. He was born in the city of Volos, an ancient mythological city, the city where the expedition and the adventure of Jason and the Argonauts search for the Golden Fleece began.  De Chirico identified himself with the gallant heroes of old Greece, and especially with Odysseus; I assume for his symbolic meaning: imagination and allegory.

Most of De Chirico's paintings from 1911 until 1917 are very sad, I would say. There is almost a feeling of no familiarity, a feeling of something inexplicably unpleasant, and a feeling of mysterious melancholy. Without any doubt they are great in a strange way. There is lots of feeling of the ancient past, lots of meeting between words, objects, architecture, history, and the sound of silence, the weirdness of the perspective, persons, the imagination, and fantasy. It is a perfect, beautiful match between a poet and an artist.

There is one painting I absolutely adore.  I didn’t see it in the flesh unfortunately. Maybe if I had, my perception of it would be different.  It is ‘The Disquieting Muses’ from 1916.

The Disquieting Muses - oil on canvas, 1916

In the background appears the Castello Estense or the Castle of Saint Michele of Ferrara. Ferrara was considered by De Chirico as a metaphysical city.  In the centre of the painting are two tailors’ dummies, waiting for something unexpected, for someone to rescue them from the nostalgia, thinking about a glorious past, talking to their own unconscious. Who knows? Moreover the answer isn’t important at all, what is important is the melancholically beautiful poetry of De Chirico's imagination.