Where to find the best-known works by Hieronymus Bosch

When I was a little girl I promised myself that I would see all the most important museums in the world. (I still have the evidence of it, in my diary) I am 51 as I am writing this and I have to say that I have almost completed my desire! However, there still are a few that I wish to visit. Some of the museums I have visited several times and I will do it again and again. Do I love museums, yes I do. I love to see the original paintings, no copy can compete with the original. I love to see the museum's buildings too; I love to smell the explicit atmosphere of specific museums. They are so diverse, so unique.

But this is not what I wanted to tell you. I want to give you some information about Hieronymus Bosch's works, and where to find them.

The first painting, his best known work "The Garden of Earthly Delights", is to be found in the Prado in Madrid. Museo del Prado is one of my favourite museums, and not only because of the great collection of Hieronymus Bosch, but also because of the great collection of Spanish art of course.

What can you find more from Bosch (fantasy work) in Prado:

• The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things;
  completed in 1485.
  
• Paradise and Hell; painted c.1510. The work consists the left and right panels of a minor triptych based on The Haywain Triptych (also in the Prado).
  

  This painting is part of a series of four, the others are Terrestrial Paradise, Fall of the Damned and Hell.
  

• Copy by a follower of Bosch The Temptation of St. Anthony.
  

The painting The Temptation of St. Anthony currently hangs in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, in Lisbon

The triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony
is to be found in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. One of my favourite museums, too. If you are in Brussels don't forget to visit it. There are some utterly amazing art works hanging on the walls.

The Garden of Earthly Delights is not my favourite work of Bosch though. My preferred painting is without doubt a triptych (from an altar) The Last Judgment created sometime after 1482. This triptych currently resides at the Academie für Bildenden Künste in Vienna. Just saw it again last November spending two weeks with my darling Jim in my darling Vienna.

The other work of Bosch that I really like is the Ascent of the Blessed, painted sometime after 1490. It can be seen in the Palazzo Ducale, in Venice, Italy.

Hell Bosch, Hieronymus

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Hieronymus Bosch and his Fantasy Art

In all books about art and all the books about fantasy art Hieronymus Bosch is mentioned as the father of surrealist art and the Fantasy Art genre. All those monsters, impossible structures of the machines and the bizarre landscapes he painted in his works, are a great example of Fantasy Art. His style was unique, strikingly free, and his symbolism, unforgettably vivid, remains unparalleled to this day.

Indeed Bosch had a tremendous fantasy or maybe even a tremendous fear of hell. Hieronymus took his work very seriously and absolutely not as an amusement. Marvellous and terrifying, he expressed an intense pessimism and reflected the anxieties of his time, one of great social and political upheaval.

It was his image of hell, his tragic view of human existence, dwelling upon the triumph of sin that forced him to paint all the horror. He was a very religious person and believed in hell, devils, monsters, life after death and all the other things that were ordinary and standard for the inhabitant of Catholic Europe in the XV and early XVI century.

He didn’t want to entertain people, he wanted to frighten them with his bizarre fantasy. I think the man himself must have been very morbid to have been so concerned with pain.

In 1488 he joined the highly respected Brotherhood of Our Lady, an arch-conservative religious group of some 40 influential citizens of 's-Hertogenbosch and some 7000 'outer-members' from all over Europe. Bosch lived at a time when the medieval period was giving way to a new age. His paintings undoubtedly reflect his concern for a changing world. Looked at in this way Bosch and his fantasies are curiously up to date.

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!