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).

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!

The enigmatic poet of Nostalgia and Melancholia:Giorgio De Chirico; Part II

Click here for part I  of De Chirico the enigmatic poet.

In Paris from 1911 until the outbreak of the First World War Giorgio de Chirico developed his ‘metaphysical painting’.  Those artworks are very enigmatic, self-consciously enigmatic. There is lots of inspiration and influence from mythology, philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis and probably his own experience. De Chirico was born in Greece in 1888 from Italian parents. He was born in the city of Volos, an ancient mythological city, the city where the expedition and the adventure of Jason and the Argonauts search for the Golden Fleece began.  De Chirico identified himself with the gallant heroes of old Greece, and especially with Odysseus; I assume for his symbolic meaning: imagination and allegory.

Most of De Chirico's paintings from 1911 until 1917 are very sad, I would say. There is almost a feeling of no familiarity, a feeling of something inexplicably unpleasant, and a feeling of mysterious melancholy. Without any doubt they are great in a strange way. There is lots of feeling of the ancient past, lots of meeting between words, objects, architecture, history, and the sound of silence, the weirdness of the perspective, persons, the imagination, and fantasy. It is a perfect, beautiful match between a poet and an artist.

There is one painting I absolutely adore.  I didn’t see it in the flesh unfortunately. Maybe if I had, my perception of it would be different.  It is ‘The Disquieting Muses’ from 1916.

The Disquieting Muses - oil on canvas, 1916

In the background appears the Castello Estense or the Castle of Saint Michele of Ferrara. Ferrara was considered by De Chirico as a metaphysical city.  In the centre of the painting are two tailors’ dummies, waiting for something unexpected, for someone to rescue them from the nostalgia, thinking about a glorious past, talking to their own unconscious. Who knows? Moreover the answer isn’t important at all, what is important is the melancholically beautiful poetry of De Chirico's imagination.