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.

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. 

"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

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!

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.

The enigmatic poet of Nostalgia and Melancholia - Giorgio De Chirico

Surrealism was very concerned with this essential quest “The wish for absolute freedom”. In particular the early fathers of surrealism wanted to set people free. They were as serious and dogmatic as the Catholic Church in its most rigid period (most of the time I would say). The natural clan leader was André Breton. He borrowed the word ‘sur-reality’ from Apollinaire. That was in 1917 after he had watched the ballet “Parade”. I read somewhere (probably in one of Robert Hughes books, he is the only art critic that I read, I like his style, although I don’t always share his feelings) that Andre Breton behaved like a demanding and touchy Pope. The group around Breton had dogmas, rituals, catechism, saints and excommunications. N.B., how can you propagate “the Idea of absolute freedom”and at the some time act like a tyrant? A very obvious contradiction. Maybe ‘Absolute freedom’ is only possible if you don’t have your own will and your own thoughts. You surround yourself in all aspects of your being, both physically and psychically with something, someone….you free yourself from feelings and thoughts….and act like a collective. (I just thought of Star Trek the next generation and the Borg Collective.)

Back to the early years of Surrealism and the Surrealists, to the period that they didn't call themselves surrealists. Giorgio De Chirico is seen as the most original and by some the best surreal painter of all time. That sounds odd if you consider the fact that De Chirico represented the early surreal trend and only for a very short period, between 1911 and 1917. After that time, in the eyes of the surrealists, he had so betrayed his talent as to have become an UNPERSON. His work and his style changed more than anyone could have imagined, from the essence of disquieting poetry to candid, mock-classical art. He also faked his own early work, starting soon after 1920, and kept doing so to the absolute confusion of art dealers and collectors. I agree that this is an obscure kind of behaviour, and an obscene betrayal of the psychic integrity of his paintings from 1911-1917.

During his stay in Paris from 1911 till 1917 and during his ‘romance’ with the surreal art scene he created absolutely fabulously enigmatic surreal paintings. De Chirico has been influenced by Freud's ideas, by the art of Arnold Bӧcklin (I will blog about him very soon) and Max Klinger and by the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. In his own words from the Paris period he concluded:

“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. It is most important that we should rid art of all that it has contained of recognizable material to date, all familiar subject matter, all traditional ideas, all popular symbols must be banished forthwith”.

A Melancholy of the Beautiful Day - 1913

Being true to his own feelings and his beliefs he shaped his ‘Nostalgias’ and ‘Melancholies’ in a real unreal, theatrical landscape (mostly from Turin) with his dummies/mannequins lost (immersed) in their enigmatic existences and their surreal unconsciousness.

The Red Tower - 1913

I haven’t see a lot of De Chirico's paintings, the original ones. I think most of them have been bought by private collectors. There are a few in MOMA in New York, some of them really poetical. Three in the Tate Modern in London, a few in German Museums (I am sure some in Stuttgart), two in Belgium in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. In the Guggenheim Museum in Venice are The Red Tower and The Nostalgia of the Poet. Those are the paintings that I have seen. I discovered also a few paintings in different cities in US. But I didn’t see them. I love the one in Guggenheim in Venice The Red Tower

The two Mannequins - 1920

Cont. tomorrow

Blueberry Fantasy by Kasia B. Turajczyk

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!

Blueberry Fantasy - acrylics on canvas, 90cmx90cm