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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Today riptapparel.comis featuring a surrealist photo illustration tee called "imaginarium". The artist that created the shirt is known for his dreamy collage-type illustrations. His name is Alex Bazinet, although he goes by the name Inner Monster and riptapparel has featured him on their site before.They only sell a shirt for 24 hours and at this moment only 7 hours left.
Here is the image of the T-shirt and the link to RIPTapparel page with the image://riptapparel.com/images/imaginarium.jpg
One of my favour Russian painters is defiantly Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel (Russian: Михаил Александрович Врубель, March 17, 1856 - April 14, 1910).
He is usually regarded as the greatest Russian painter of the Symbolist movement. His art is so unique and original that he shouldn't be label to any movement at all. In reality, he deliberately stood aloof from contemporary art trends, so that the origin of his unusual manner should be sought probably in the Late Byzantine and Early Renaissance painting.
Seraph based on Pushkin poem
For me personally he is a personality with a great imagination, fantasy and originality. He perfectly fits in my private gallery of unusual, bizzar, different, fantastic in art.
Vrubel was born in the Omsk city (Siberia), in a military lawyer's family and graduated from the Law Faculty of St Petersburg University in 1880. Next year he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts. In his earliest works, he exhibited striking talent for drawing and highly idiosyncratic outlook. Although he still relished academic monumentality, he would later develop a penchant for fragmentory composition and "unfinished touch".
In 1884, he was summoned to replace the lost 12th-century murals and mosaics in the St. Cyril's Church of Kiev with the new ones. In order to execute this commission, he went to Venice to study the medieval Christian art. It was here that, in the words of an art historian, "his palette acquired new strong saturated tones resembling the iridescent play of precious stones". Most of his works painted in Venice have been lost, because the artist was more interested in creative process than in promoting his artwork. In 1886, he returned to Kiev, where he submitted some monumental designs to the newly-built St Volodymir Cathedral. The jury, however, failed to appreciate the striking novelty of his works, and they were rejected. At that period, he executed some delightful illustrations for Hamlet and Anna Karenina which had little in common with his later dark meditations on the Demon and Prophet themes.
While in Kiev, Vrubel started painting sketches and watercolours illustrating the Demon, a long Romantic poem by Mikhail Lermontov. The poem described the carnal passion of "an eternal nihilistic spirit" to a Georgian girl Tamara. At that period Vrubel developed a keen interest in Oriental arts, and particularly Persian carpets, and even attempted to imitate their texture in his paintings.
In 1890, Vrubel moved to Moscow. Like other artists associated with the Art Nouveau, he excelled not only in painting but also in applied arts, such as ceramics, majolics, and stained glass. He also produced architectural masks, stage sets, and costumes.
Seated Demon
In 1890 he finished his large painting of Seated Demon in the Garden (It is to see in Moscow, in Tretyakov Gallery). This painting brought notoriety to Vrubel. Most conservative critics accused him of "wild ugliness", I LOVE IT! Others like art patron Savva Mamontov praised the Demon series as "fascinating symphonies of a genius". Unfortunately the Demon, like other Vrubel's works, doesn't look as it did when it was painted, as the artist added bronze powder to his oils in order to achieve particularly luminous, glistening effects.
In 1896, he fell in love with the famous opera singer Nadezhda Zabela. Half a year later they married and settled in Moscow, where Zabela was invited by Mamontov to perform in his private opera theatre. While in Moscow, Vrubel designed stage sets and costumes for his wife, who sang the parts of the Snow Maiden, the Swan Princess, and Princess Volkhova in Rimsky-Korsakov's operas. Falling under the spell of Russian fairy tales, he executed some of his most acclaimed pieces, including Pan (1899), The Swan Princess (1900), and Lilacs (1900). In 1901, Vrubel returned to the demonic themes in the large canvas Demon Downcast. In order to astound the public with underlying spiritual message, he repeatedly repainted the demon's ominous face, even after the painting had been exhibited to the overwhelmed audience.
The last decade of his life was a very difficult one; he had a severe nervous breakdown, he was hospitalized in mental clinic. While there, he painted a mystical Pearl Oyster (1904) and striking variations on the themes of Pushkin's poem The Prophet. In 1906, overpowered by mental disease and approaching blindness, he had to give up painting.
Pan
By the way if you love movies, see Guillermo Del Toro's The Pan Labirynt. There is a such of atmosphere in this masterpiece that reminded me some of Vrubel's paintings.
Witold Wojtkiewicz - A Knight’s Tale – pastel of paper (from the cycle Ceremonies, 1908- 09)
Witold Wojtkiewicz is the most original polish painter from the XX century. Probably he is absolutely unknown for the world outside Poland the day today. But in 1907 his art aroused enough interest of André Gide and Maurice Denise to organise in the same year an individual exhibition at Galerie Druet in Paris.
This are the words that Gidé wrote about the impression that Wojtkiewicz art made on him at the exhibition in Berlin, the first time that he saw it: “[…] his exhibition led me to the conclusion that he was quite alienated in his country.[..] This was obvious. The exhibition brought together works which although not devoid of value, gave us nothing new. […] when the astonishing significance of some of the canvases stopped us. They (the canvases of Wojtkiewicz) illuminated the slightly darkened room not with the brightness of the colours, as if the easy of profaner they may seem grey, but with the strange harmony of the tone, the painful fantasy of the drawing, and the pathetic and emotional interplay of colours”.
Gidé's words faithfully described the situation of Wojtkiewicz in Poland art climate of the time. The artist Wojtkiewicz was quite aware of the clearly different separateness of his art. It seems to me that he even emphasised it with his eccentricity and his unapproachableness (his impeccably foppish style of dressing).
He didn’t live a long life; born in 1879 in Warsaw, died in 1909 in Warsaw. Some people called him the precursor of surrealism; it could be true. His art was a phenomenon completely distinct in its time. It is distinguished by its advanced deformation of reality, which aims at emphasising the sadness and sometimes the absurd fictitiousness of human existence. In his art he combined grotesque with lyrics. His behaviour was always injected with a large dose of irony, as well as self-irony. His art, individual in every aspect, derived from his poetic imagination, was shaped, reached full maturity and was extinguished in less than seven years.
For me he is one of the exceptionally original artists; the one with the magical, unrepeatable poetic language of imagination. Maybe he was after all more a writer and a poet than a painter?
I posted here four images of his paintings from different cycles. All of them are more of less surreal, fantastic, with an atmosphere of strangeness and tension of the scenes. All of them represented the creative act of an extremely personalised vision of the world.
Witold Wojtkiewicz - Marionettes – oil on canvas (from the cycle The Circus,1907)
Witold Wojtkiewicz - Winter Tale, Tournament – tempera of canvas (from the cycle Children’s Poses, 1908)
Witold Wojtkiewicz - Abduction of the Princess – tempera of canvas (from the cycle Children’s Poses,1908)
I hope you have heard the name Zdzislaw Beksinski. One of the most talented Fantasy Artists from the last decades of XX Century. (Born in 1941, died in 2005).
I am writing a post about him, but for the time being I thought you would like to see a video about his art. Under the video you will find a link to a amazing book about him (it is from Amazon.com). Watch this inspiring video. The artwork is 100% better in reality than on the screen.
I am busy at the moment writing a book about Fantasy Art and its history. While searching online and reading reports and books on this subject, I have discovered that some artists, that for me so obviously (and without any doubt)should belong to the genre of unique fantasy art/fantastic artists haven’t been mention at all; either in books or reports. Extremely peculiar.
One of the artists that I haven’t come across in any of the sources I looked through is Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Maybe the reason that nobody has mentioned him is the fact that his art is very bizarre and very difficult to categorize. People love to pigeonhole everything. If something or somebody is very unique or uncanny or extremely original and difficult to put away in a drawer with other similar things than sometimes we just ignore it or forget it. This is only my speculation.
Back to the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo.Arcimboldo was born in Milan in 1527 and grew up during the High Renaissance (Mannerism). He was extremely famous during his lifetime. He was a court painter of Emperor Ferdinand I (Habsburg), then Maximilian II and at the end Rudolph II. Part of Arcimboldo's duties included designing gala events for the imperial family. These were flashy affairs with gilded fountains and rivers of champagne, parades and promenades, flocks of coloured birds, music, theatre, tons of original artwork, sculptures, and much pageantry. Arcimboldo invented many unique special effects for these events such as an enormous hydro-mechanically powered musical instrument which acted like a modern colour organ; called the "Harpsichord of Colour." He was a man of many talents, and in the vein of other Renaissance great spirits (like Leonardo da Vinci) he served also as an architect, stage designer, engineer, water engineer and art specialist.
But as soon as he was dead he was totally forgotten.I can only speculate again about the reason, why people lost interest in his art. Perhaps he was misunderstood by the generations that followed? Maybe his sinister paintings weren’t enjoyable, interesting or intriguing? Or maybe they were too bamboozling, too insane for people of past centuries. Some of the contemporary reviews spoke about “the state of a deranged mind”.The interest in his abstruse and fantastic pictures, of which we only have a very few originals nowadays, revived only at the end of the 19th century. The surrealist movement brought him back into the public interest.
Personally I like his bizarre paintings. They are such unique art works, unique concepts, the creations of a very eccentric, intelligent and sophisticated brain. The documents of the time bear witness to the fact that monarchs and his contemporaries in general were also enthusiastic about his art.
His most recognizable paintings are known as the The Four Seasons series. The artistic concept of these pictures from 1563 was unique and laid the foundation of Arcimboldo’s success as a painter. The Four Seasons consist of four paintings - Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. All of them depict faces and heads but not normal human heads, vegetable-fruit-flower-tree heads.
Other famous works by him are: Water and Fire (1566), The Lawyer (1566), The Cook (1570) another series of the Four Seasons from 1572, two series of Four Seasons in 1573. He painted The Four Seasons twice again in 1577.
In 1591 he painted two of his most famous pictures, Flora (c.1591) and Vertumnus (1590-1591. Vertumnus is a portrait of Rudolph II, showing him as Vertumnus, the ancient Roman god of vegetation and transformation. The painting Verumnus consists entirely of magnificent fruits, flowers and vegetables. Rudolph II awarded Arcimboldo one of his highest orders in 1592. Next year on 11 July 1593 the painter died.
The Winter 1572 (Private Collection, Bergamo)
Looking at Arcimboldo’s bizarre paintings I can’t escape from thoughts about the human brain and the endless possibilities of the uncontrolled imagination. How did a man born in the time of the Renaissance, in a time when nobody painted such paintings, decide to create monstrous images of human heads?
For example, have a look at the Winter - head from The Four Seasons.The profile of the man is made up from the knobby stump of a tree, with a broken branch for the nose, moss for the stubble on the chin and two parasitic mushrooms for the lips. Is this more or less sinister than the hellish monsters thought up by Hieronymus Bosch? Arcimboldo paints a parody that is at times almost plausible in its suggestions of death and decay in a living being. The Winter portrait, the image of the head can horrify people, but at the same time it is so amazingly beautiful. The balance of the colour-palette is astonishing and tremendous. What a great imagination Arcimboldo had, and what a great colourist he was!
These puzzle-visionary-capriccio images of all the Portraits-Heads-Faces made by Arcimboldo are incredibly unusual, surreal and fantastic. I am curious if there are viewers who won’t see any faces in his paintings, only flowers and vegetables?
Above is a painting from a series based on the Four Seasons; this one is called Summer. The nose of the person appears to be made out of a very ripe cucumber. The chin is from a pear, and the cheek is made from a peach.Look closely at the man's coat. Can you see the name of the artist woven into the collar of his jacket, and the date 1573 embroidered on the shoulder?
Do you have any idea, even a fuzzy one, what you get if you mix together the spirit of Hieronymus Bosch's creations and the legacy of the medieval art plus the speck of Chagall's "world of dreams" plus Japanese background? No...........I haven't had any idea too.......till I found Shoji Tanaka.
Shoji Tanaka is a Japanese artist, genre Fantasy Art or maybe he will appreciate the name Fantastic Artist or Surreal Art (but I think he is not sensu stricto).
I have discovered (maybe I am wrong, please correct me if I am) that his paintings are hard to be found in galleries in Europe.
But there is something to see in USA, Main Street, Maroochy, Queensland. Never been there.
This year there is a great, great exhibition of Fantasy Art & Fantastic Art & Surreal Art in Japan, in Kyoto. Most of the Artist will be Japanese's artist. I would love to see it, I have been fascinated since 30 years by Japanese literature – incredible magical and beautiful.
I think it will be amazing to be there, but I am not sure how to accomplish it. The opening is today, the exhibition is open only one week and I still can't walk right after my foot-surgery in February..
