This is the first painting from the surreal and 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 yet 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)
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?
My name is Mintaka. I am stranger here; I was born in the Nebula of Orion. Your species is dominant, but weird. The only time in the long calendar of the year when you are kind, forgiving, charitable and pleasant for each other is the Christmas time. It is the only time when “men and women open their shut-up hearts freely”. (One of your famous writers pointed this out a long time ago). I am not sure I understand that. Why don’t you behave in such a way on all the other days of the year? I am watching them and waiting to see you brave and beautiful. Maybe one day….
Mintaka meditating about the meaning of Christmas; mixed media made by Kasia. B. Turajczyk
Recently I made a few new images for my story about Betelgeuse and Mintaka, the Boltzmann Dragons. I would love to share these with you and hear your comments and criticisms about them.
I am not sure if I explained the Boltzmann Brain paradox (problem) before. This concept was one of the sources/inspiration for my story about the Shepherds of Seven from Orion and the two creatures that arrived by accident on Earth, Betelgeuse and Mintaka. They are kind of dragon like creatures, but only because my imagination created them so. They are particles, fluctuations, brain-accumulations of the knowledge of the billions of years old cosmos. The Boltzamann Brain (Boltzmann Paradox) hypothesis/idea is named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) who advanced an idea that the known universe arose as a random fluctuation, similar to a process through which self-aware entities - Boltzmann brains - might arise. Such a self-aware entity may arise due only to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos.
From Wikipedia:
The concept arises from the need to explain why we observe such a large degree of organization in the universe. The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in the universe will always increase. We may think of the most likely state of the universe as one of high entropy, closer to uniform and without order. So why is the observed entropy so low?
Boltzmann proposed that we and our observed low-entropy world are a random fluctuation in a higher-entropy universe. Even in a near-equilibrium state, there will be stochastic fluctuations in the level of entropy. The most common fluctuations will be relatively small, resulting in only small amounts of organization, while larger fluctuations and their resulting greater levels of organization will be comparatively more rare. Large fluctuations would be almost inconceivably rare, but this can be explained by the enormous size of the universe and by the idea that if we are the results of a fluctuation, there is a "selection bias": We observe this very unlikely universe because the unlikely conditions are necessary for us to be here, an expression of the anthropic principle.
This leads to the Boltzmann brain concept: If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which is only just able to create a single self-aware entity. For every universe with the level of organization we see, there should be an enormous number of lone Boltzmann brains floating around in unorganized environments. This refutes the observer argument above: the organization I see is vastly more than what is required to explain my consciousness, and therefore it is highly unlikely that I am the result of a stochastic fluctuation.
The Boltzmann brains paradox is that it is more likely that a brain randomly forms out of the chaos with false memories of its life than that the universe around us would have billions of self-aware brains.
Don Page, a famous physicist, recently wrote this about the Boltzmann Problem:
"Unless our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate (i.e., on the present cosmological timescale of Giga years, rather than on the quantum recurrence timescale of googolplexes), it would apparently produce an infinite number of observers per commoving volume by thermal or vacuum fluctuations (Boltzmann brains). If the number of ordinary observers per commoving volume is finite, this scenario seems to imply zero likelihood for us to be ordinary observers and minuscule likelihoods for our actual observations.”
If that is true, it would mean that you and me, you reading this and I writing this, are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than persons with a real past and possible future (if we are lucky or unlucky enough). My and your memories and the world we think we see around us are illusions.
“Hence, our observations suggest that this scenario is incorrect and that perhaps our universe is decaying at an astronomical rate.”
In other words it means our universe will die one day.
I hope I have given you some clues about the story I am writing about the two unusual creatures, Betelgeuse and Mintaka.
Here are some new images I made. I hope you will find them enjoyable and interesting.
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.
Exeter is an old, interesting and thereby very picturesque city. It was probably somewhat in March when I discovered this Fantasy Graffiti painting at the walls of the under-street passage for bikes and pedestrians. I took some photos. Maybe I didn't know where to look but I couldn’t find a signature or a sign so I do not know the creator.
I am a fan of graffiti art; some of the wall paintings are amazing, they are really excellent. I think that this kind of art (maybe abstract art, too) could be compared to jazz music - spontaneous, improvisational and real. I would once try again to paint on a wall, this time outdoor.
My passion for painting became prominent for the first time when I was 4 years old. It was somewhere in the summer time, our apartment has just been painted; you could still smell the fresh paints on the walls. The kitchen was full of fresh fruits: lots of different berries and currents – just imagine all the pure, beautiful colours and pigments. My parents weren’t at home and our nanny went to our neighbour (no idea why). Only me and my oldest brother and of course the walls and the fruits were there. I have no idea how I convinced my brother to help me with this performance but I did. We carried the boxes with the fruits to the living room and we started to cover the walls with the colourful juice leaking out the fruits,we pushed and rubbed them against the walls. What a happening! Unfortunately I don’t remember anything about what I felt and what kind of effect had my first spontaneous artistic creation “Graffiti Indoor” on others. I have been told that my parents weren’t happy and they punished me in the traditional way: they spanked me. But even that my bottom was hurt and painful it didn’t discourage me to try other indoor walls. I did it on and off almost my whole life, by and large. It is a pity that there are no photos, no documentation of my wall paintings.
The 2009 Fantasy Calendar has just been released. I hope you like it.
The Fantasy Calendar as you can imagine is about imagination, dragons, fantasy, space and Betelgeuse and Mintka ofcourse. All the images come from the story "Betelgeuse and Mintaka, the Boltzmann Dragons". The are lost of new images, you will find them in the new video that I hope to finish soon.
Mintaka is awake for a few months by now and he grew up and changed his shape......and I forgot to tell you about this. He looked at me today very upset and somehow sad and I had no choice than to promise him to put him online. And here he is, my sweet Mintaka with his funny-brush-like tail. I didn't suspect an alien species of narcissism. Maybe he is already to long on Earth. Probably Jim had a bad influence over Mintaka. Ha......ha. It is not my influence on Mintaka, as an artist I am very humble of course. :-)))
Some Fantasy Art images, photos and paintings I made.
Weird World - based on a picture of the sky I took a year ago at the Beacon Hill. I manipulated the photo, I turned it around.
Fantasy - The green part of this image is a photo - I took it in Williton, it is a meadow/ a field a few minutes walk from our house here. The dark part I painted in the Adobe Photoshop.
Fantasy Evening in Cologne - I love Cologne, I think it is a wonderful city, great museums, very interesting collection of art, nice city for a long walk, the old part is small but cosy. And the Cathedral is just amazing. But about the photo - ordinary photo with some extra visual effects - the planets. When we stood at the other side of the river and were taking the photos of the evening, the bridge and the Dom I just thought/ had a vision "it will be wonderful if you could see beautiful big planets in the sky in that spring time...in Cologne (don't do any association with the song Spring Time for Hitler from the Producers (nota bene I love this movie)). Made in Photoshop too.
Panta Rhei - my oil on canvas painting. The inspiration for this painting was Callas, Maria Callas. I listened to her singing the most beautiful arias from the less popular operas and just painted. By the way Panta Rhei means " everything is in a state of flux". This is a famous aphorism and it comes from Simplicius but it used to used to characterize Heraclitus, one of the greatest Greek philosophers. Phanta Rhei: the ocean, the bird, and the doors to our desires and our dreams and our subconscious.
Wormhole - this is pure digital image. I was experimented with Photo Shop and discovered per accident lots of possibilities presented inside the Adobe Photoshop. I drew some stuff and than just used some tools I discovered. It is fun!
More digital images you can find at my facebook page: http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/album.php?aid=20387&id=608063290
I would love to here your comments what do you think about my surreal/ digital/ fantasy art paintings/ work.
This is inexplicable but nevertheless I am fascinated by the poetry and art of William Blake.
William Blake, the visionary, even hallucinatory English painter and poet, who lived at the dawn of the technological era (1757-1827). I think he was a better poet than a painter, but this opinion is in the eye of the beholder. Unlike most artists of his era he did not draw from life, claiming that the visions that appeared before him were clearer and more vivid than his perception of external reality. He was a happy lunatic, an fantastic artist or maybe a realistic one? Though it is hard to classify Blake’s body of work in one genre, he heavily influenced the Romantic poets with recurring themes of good and evil, heaven and hell, knowledge and innocence, and external reality versus inner. Going against common conventions of the time, Blake believed in sexual and racial equality and justice for all, rejected the Old Testament’s teachings in favour of the New, and abhorred oppression in all its forms. He focused his creative efforts beyond the five senses, for,
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.—from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Around 1805-1810, Blake was commissioned to create over a hundred paintings illustrating books from the Bible. Among these was a four-painting cycle of the Great Red Dragon (Satan) from the Book of Revelations in the Bible. The dragon is described as having seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven crowns. His tail drew one third of the stars of the sky, and threw them to the earth.
Here are the paintings from the cycle of the Great Red Dragon:
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?
Introduction Video to my new story, in pictures as well as in word, about two extraordinary dragons, Betelgeuse and Mintaka from the Nebula in the Constellation of Orion.
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..
I am very, very busy at the moment with a brand new internet project. It combines Art, Fantasy Art and Dragons from Orion in an Online World. I am very curious to discover in which direction it will develop and grow.
In the beginning I got a crazy idea, a vision, and a wild story in my brain. The story is about two baby dragons from another planet and another celestial time. The next step was the creation of the dragons. I just sat down and drew them. Jim liked them very much, his kids liked them too, my kids and friends liked them also, and I .........I just fell in love with them...I'm still in love.
Enough words about it, if you are curious just go to the page and keep in touch as things progress, I think the voyage will be very exciting. I hope you will enjoy my creation together with me.
