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 lovely evening walk, a golden and blue hole opened out of nowhere, and both of them were taken on a new adventure. Maybe they could even wake up in an unknown 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

"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).

The adventure with an Ocean Monster and a Blueberry Angel.

My third painting from the Blueberry-land Series.

Blueberryer and Blueberryess have found themselves in a tangled situation again.

Against all advice, Blueberryess jumped into the ocean because she wanted to know what she could find deep down in the black water. After that Blueberryer as a true gentlemen had no other option than to take a deep breath and jump into the ocean too. He did take the jump on his bike though. Of course he had a choice. To forget his Blueberryess and go for a wonderful bike ride in the “magnifique” Blueberry valley, sipping slowly the elegant Blueberry Cocktail at the top of the Blueberry Hill and enjoying the marvellous view over Blueberry Land. But as a victim of his own conception of his greatness, he had no other option than to jump into the black waters of that ocean. Or maybe it was true love?

This time only a miracle could help them. Blueberryess was swept swiftly into the Ocean Monster’s maw, and Bluberryer following her on his bike did almost the same. Suddenly out of the nothingness a Blueberry Angel appeared close to the monster. Would he be able to rescue the two reckless Blueberries?

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!

Visionary art in Cornwall - Tom Paddle

I have a ritual when it comes to my own birthday; I like to be on the road. Generally, I think that a birthday, for various reasons, practical as philosophical, is an event which is best not to talk about, which should be quickly erased from ones memory. This year we had planned to go to Florence, Tuscany, but we ended up in Cornwall, South West England, instead. It was absolutely beautiful, very windy, wild, historical and highly artistic. We stayed in the Artist Residence Hotel  in Penzance which was run by artists. The staff was extremely friendly. - I sincerely recommend it.

We decided to devote the last day to the arts. Within the framework of Cornwall Open Studios, we visited two group exhibition in West Cornwall, and one individual studio in Mid Cornwall.  The last studio that we visited was an unusual one. From a list of two hundred and five artists and craftspeople, I wanted to see this the most. Why? Because it was the studio of a visionary artist. This was the only visionary painter I could find in the whole catalogue. And so it happened that we went to Sunnyside Cottage in Trescoll, Lockengate, close to the Eden Project. There we met Tom Paddle.
 Tom Paddle is a remarkable person, not unusual for someone from the peace-happiness-flower-power-generation. He told us that he has always been immersed in the study and practices of paganism and the occult – gods and goddesses, mythology and folklore. He is surrounded by a magical, beautiful nature.

My art is my life. Everything I paint is a reflection of my surroundings in the beautiful Cornish countryside. My inspiration comes from looking for shapes and patterns in nature however mundane. Similarly, when I paint, I allow images to emerge from the random patterns on a semi-blank canvas and have always found the practice similar to "automatic writing" of psychics

He is also a naturalist and herbalist. He spends much of his time in the woods. He is also a trout and sea trout fisherman. He is a very diverse person. He is also known as a musician playing Celtic folk and mediaeval music, and he has a collection of historical instruments. He also writes poetry and fiction and performs as a storyteller with a gang of bawdy puppets. Woo, he is a real Renaissance Man.

Back to his art; he is a very good craftsman, an excellent one. Personally, I am not a big fan of visionary art. I find that lots of art works that belong to or are classified as visionary art are very kitschy and “cheap”. In contrast to the surrealists, they tend to be rather serious and lacking in humour. There is no place for playful idiocy. However, I have to admit that I really like most of Tom’s paintings. The majority of his paintings are created in acrylics or water color crayons or a mixture. He paints lots of visionary landscapes, scenes and gods/goddesses, and other creatures from diverse mythologies, the early history of our planet and folklore. His technical skills are excellent. For myself, I love his portraits, faces of the goddesses, spirits of nature, shamans and other creatures. They are really magical. We bought a print of one of his visionary portraits; Woodspirit. Here is the image of this work.

Woodspirit by Tom Paddle

I think he is a good portraitist. But decide for yourself, here are two other images of Tom's paintings, the one I liked.

Puck - Woodland God

Pneuma - The Breath of Life

Here is the link to his website with diverse work: http://www.tompaddleart.co.uk

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

Frans Verbeeck and the Mockery of Human Follies

“The Mockery of Human Follies” is one of those mysterious paintings that don’t allow me to stop thinking about them. In the first place because it is an excellent art work (in my humble opinion) and in the second place (maybe it should be the first place) because it is a satirical-moralistic-fantastic painting in the Medieval tradition. And I am addicted to medieval art.

My first impression of the painting is that it is a realistic-satirical work a’la Breugel. I see a scene of the life of peasants in a village, with a wonderful renaissance landscape in the background. But then I discover all the unusual things. The faces of the pictured people are odd, some of the ugly, some of them not, but almost everyone is smiling. And the smile isn’t an innocent, nice smile; it is definitely a rascally-devilish smile. There are lots of strange scenes, unexpected moments, shows and associations in this painting. I see lots of resemblance with Erasmus famous book “Lof der Zotheid” (In Praise of Folly, in English). Erasmus used words to describe the folly of humans; the painter of “The mockery of humans follies” used the language of the colours of his paints.

The Dorotheum in Vienna attributed the painting to Frans Verbeeck. He belonged together with Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Breugel and Adriaen Brouwer to the group of the XVI century Flemish painters who painted satirical-moralising work. The fantasy and satire go hand in hand in lots of pictures, drawings, carvings, decorations, sculptures, miniatures, illuminated manuscripts in the art work of the medieval time. The Flemish painters did not have to invent all the monstrous creatures by themselves. They could fall back on a rich and broad collection of peculiar species, exotic monsters and extremely weird people from the medieval artists. What they probably did was add some new symbols, pictures of farmers and poor people, and of course lots of hidden eroticism behind the realistic scenes.

Frans Verbeeck is mentioned in the book written by Carel van Mander about important Netherlands and German painters. The book was written probably in the XVI century. Carel van Mander died in 1606. The first edition is from 1764. Frans Verbeeck was born and worked in Mechelen in Belgium. He died in 1570, but we don’t know his date of birth. His paintings can be admired in the Centre for Old Art 't Vliegend Peert in Mechelen in Belgium.



The painting, “The Mockery of Human Follies” was for sale in 2007 at an auction by Dorotheum in Vienna. The guide price was between €65.000 and €75.000. It was sold of course. I would love to have the painting on my own wall, look at it every day, discover new stories, hidden metaphors, hidden symbols. I'm still trying to work out the significance of the tiny people present in such numbers. Are they us? And are the huge people the gods playing with us? laughing at us? or it is just us, the human species playing with other humans? Please let me know if you have any more information about this painting. My curiosity requires answers!

Dragons and Saints at V&A Museum in London

Last Monday, which was February 1st, I spent a few hours at the V&A Museum in London. That wasn't really enough to see all of the new Medieval and Renaissance galleries, but I had a plane to catch back to Amsterdam in the early evening. You will really need a whole day to study the splendid collection of textiles, paintings, sculpture, glass, metalwork, prints, manuscripts, furniture, ceramics and jewellery.


I very much like the concept of telling the story of European art and culture from AD 300–1600; from the decline of the Roman Empire to the end of the Renaissance period, by using not only strictly art pieces from those periods but also everyday objects, design objects and even pieces of building and churches. There is even one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks to admire!

However of course I was searching for fantasy and fantastic elements in the paintings, drawings, sculptures, stained glass windows and so on. Here some photos with interesting and wonderful pieces from the collection.

St Margaret and the Dragon, about 1530-1540 (from the Church of Saint Germain, France.)
As the legend has it she made a miraculous escape from the belly of the Dragon.




St. George from a church in Ulm (Germany) about circa 1480-1490. This is a figure of St. George in limewood, and carved from one piece of wood. St George was a saint from the East, but as the result of the crusades he became popular throughout Europe. Having rescued a princess by slaying a dragon, he personified the ideals of chivalry and was often depicted with the tamed or dead beast beside him.



By the way, this Dragon doesn't really look enough Dragon -like. It is more a dog-old man figure then a danger dragon. But at the same time it is more original than the St. Margaret's Dragon.



This is an image of a Lamp of a Dragon, from Padua, around 1500.

Four Season - Winter and Automn in Dunchideock

Autoumn in Dunchideock by Kasia B. Turajczyk

Winter in Dunchideock by Kasia B. Turajczyk

My fantasy abstract paintings from the series Four Seasons. (it has nothing to do with The Four Seasons of Vivaldi; however I love his four violin concertos, especially when listen to the concertos in Venice)
I painted first "Autumn in Dunchideock" acrylic painting , without the intention of it being a part of a series. But yesterday I painted Winter in Dunchideock and now I am sure that spring and summer will fallow.
In both paintings I used acrylics plus lots of weird materials. My fantasies about the seasons, vou la!

Playing with Magritte in the spirit of Breughel

Life can be very surrealistic from time to time, in fact more often than you might expect. But surrealistic and at the same time optimistic doesn’t happen very often. But it happened to me on Sunday (May 30th 2009) in Brussels.
Reneé Magritte’s universe was conjured up on the Place Royal… giant creatures and live installations from Magritte’s paintings, a ballerina dancing on top of a piano, girls with baskets full of apples, and men with bowler hats all on a beautiful sunny day and with great music. The magical, surreal universe of Reneé Magritte came to life. The Musée Magritte Museum opened that door for us.
My partner and I were among the hundreds of fortunate people in Brussels to visit the new Musée Magritte Museum, before the official opening, and for free! René Magritte is without doubt one of the most important Belgian artists and one of the most influential ‘mass culture’ surrealist painters. He was possibly more of a thinker and illustrator than a painter. As a surrealist and a socialist he hoped to change the world and the mentality of the crowd, but he didn’t. Instead he became the most popular artist of the XX century. At the end of his life he also became very wealthy; he painted what the buyers wanted. What I personally like in his work is not his technique (Dali was absolutely a better painter), not the paintings by themselves, but the irony behind his surrealism. I love Magritte’s imagination and his jokes with his viewers - “Hey folks - I am taking you in!”. In some sense he had the same credo the I have; I believe that we are here on this planet by accident and not for long, actually and that our existence is meaningless, and that we shouldn’t take ourselves so damn seriously – it seems to me that Magritte thought about his own universe in much the same way. In fact I discovered at the weekend that during the second world war Magritte went so far as to paint works in the style of Picasso, Braque, Max Ernst and others. Some of these "forgeries" were subsequently sold in an auction at the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels. He also forged money and he spent it successfully. (I like this man).

The great Surrealist René Magritte once said:

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing…. they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Inspirited by Magritte, my partner Jim and one of my favourite painters, Peter Breughel the Elder, here is a new work of mine

“Playing with Magritte in the spirit of Breughel”.

This work is available for sale as a quality print and/or poster on RedBubble

View words about the new Musée Magritte Museum. The multidisciplinary collection contains more than 200 works consisting in oils on canvas, gouaches, drawings, sculptures and painted objects but also in advertising posters, music scores and vintage. Official opening of the museum was yesterday, June, 2nd 2009. The museum is situated close to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, on Place Royale 1.

Witold Wojtkiewicz - phenomenal artist

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 to 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. These are the words that Gidé wrote about the impression that Wojtkiewicz's 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's 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; he was born in 1879 in Warsaw and 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. They are more or less surreal and fantastic, with an atmosphere of strangeness and tension in 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)

A new painitng of Betelgeuse

My dragons are growing. They just got out of their eggs.
Here is Betelgeuse. He is wondering about the world around him.

The Witcher Intro

The Witcher Intro has been nominated by Visual Effects Society for the annual VES awards in the category of "Outstanding Pre-Rendered Visuals in a Video Game".

Outstanding production by Tomasz Baginski, Marcin Kobylecki, Grzegorz Kukus and Maciek Jackiewicz from Platige Image. Check out their other projects including the "Cathedral"

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