Tomasz Setowski

I've just got back from my Christmas holiday in Poland. My partner Jim and I spent the first night in the Marriott in Warsaw. We arrived in the late evening, and while searching for a restaurant in the Marriott to celebrate Jim's birthday I noticed some very unusual paintings on the walls. They were fantasy art paintings, it was incontrovertible. They name of the artist was Tomasz Setowski. I had never heard about him before this particular moment in the Marriott in Warsaw. They were paintings he created between 2000 and 2007. Some of the works have previously been displayed in New York, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and elswhere. He is a very original, extraordinary, unique, surrealist Polish painter and I have never heard about him. Not good!

And he is very famous, actually. The next day in the morning I saw more of his works hanging on the second floor in the Marriott Hotel. He is a great artist, not doubt about this, but I missed something in his paintings. His imagination is so cold, so far-away. With Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Breughel you can feel the fear or the grimness or the grotesque. But here in Sętowski's paintings I couldn't find any emotion. They were very individual fantasy paintings only maybe understood by their creator. But this is only my feeling; Tomasz Sętowski is a great painter of the magical realism school.

"Uncanny Valley" phenomenon

What has an brain phenomenon known as the uncanny valley to do with fantasy art? It has a lot.
Fantasy art would not exist without fantasy fans. Fantasy fans, especially the fans of fantasy movies, love creepy human-like creatures and the uncanny feelings they experience when they see those creatures.
For example, the fans of The lord of the Ring films praised especially the character Gollum. Half animal, half human, he made viewer's skin crawl.
To understand why people react in this way to the creation of human-like scary characters and which part of our brain is responsible for the feeling of horror a few scientists from University College London investigated this phenomenon. They discovered by scanning the brains of subjects being show videos of a lifelike robot picking up a cup, as well as the same movement performed by less realistic robot and a person. The results reveal there is a network of neurons in the parietal cortex that was especially active in the case of the lifelike robot. This area of the brain is known to contain 'mirror neurons', which are active when someone imagines performing an action they are observing. While watching all three videos, people imagine picking up the cup themselves. This 'breach of expectation' could trigger extra brain activity and produce the uncanny feelings.
Karl McDorman, who researches human-robot interaction at Indiana University in Indianapolis, suggests that the uncanny valley phenomenon may stem from a 'fear of one's own mortality' and an 'evolved mechanism for avoiding pathogens'. ' The uncanny valley is about a mismatch in human expectations', he says.

Source: New Scientist No 2627

http://www.newscientist.com

Shaman - Raven Dreamdancer

I went yesterday to a shaman's concert. Here is the link to her website http://www.whole-earth.tv/
She is a good friend of me, Raven Dreamdancer. She is a sound Shaman, the first in this kind of style. The sound that she makes is beautiful. You close your eyes and you just fallow the sound and your imagination. It is a fantasy art pure sang.
I painted the most beautiful fantasy art painting that I ever made in my entire life.
Imagine the cosmos, the intense, unending, infinite, disinterested, endless, indisputable, careless, unjustified, absolute, unintentional, sleepless, independent, ruthless, unfeeling, insolence cosmos and than floating free sprites somewhere there. Just floating in this horrible cosmos.....beautiful

Dragons World

The Truth about the Dragons. Make the fantasy real!

Beowulf

Very soon, we are going to publish an old English epic, the epic of Beowulf, the most precious relic of Old English, and, indeed, of all early Germanic literature. I am sure that you would like to see the newest movie version too. Just released.

The following is a brief outline of some general facts of Beowulf.

The poem was originally transcribed in Old English sometime between 720 and 796 a.d. making it one of the oldest historical texts relating to this period in time.
The poem itself tells the story of a noble Swede (Beowulf) who saves a troubled group of Danes from a deformed monster known as ‘Grendel’ and its mother. Beowulf later encounters a dragon which mortally wounds him, thus ending the tale. During the years since, the story has been greatly Christianized to depict Beowulf as being a servant of the monotheistic God, and Grendel being a servant of ‘hell’, no doubt in an attempt to cover up the pagan origins of the text.
The story has numerous translations into modern English, most famous of which by Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, which won the Whitbread prize in 1999. English, Old English and MP3 audio versions of the poem are available in the public domain. The story is also seen to have been an influence on the modern fantasy genre, most notable of which being J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy which bears many resemblances the Beowulf tale.

William Blake

To see the world in a grain of sand,
and to see heaven in a wild flower
hold infinity in the palm of your hands,
and eternity in an hour.

William Blake

http://www.kasiaturajczyk.com/