February, 2012
“Immune”: Floria Sigismondi
Floria Sigismondi is an Italian-Canadian photographer, director, and filmmaker who breaks the boundaries between mainstream and alternative visual culture. She has worked with many high-profile artists on their music videos, including Björk, The Cure, Marilyn Manson, and The White Stripes. Her personal projects and commercial work both amaze me with their preternatural beauty and color.
Floria’s vivid, hallucinatory images are morbid, beautiful, and hyper[sur]real. Her works take place in a strange, artificial, and gorgeously colorful world of her own – film stills from her videos could be taken for photo-art and vice versa.
Tags: floria sigismondi, medical-themed, music videos, otherworldly photography, religious imagery, saturated color, self-portraits, surreal horror, virgin mary
Death and the Maiden: The Art of Abigail Larson
Abigail Larson creates beautiful, Gothic-inspired illustrations, often depicting her favorite literary themes: the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Carroll, and fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast.
Her neo-Victorian drawings, done digitally but emulating the look of ink + watercolor (her original medium), are highly stylized, fluid, haunting, and arabesque, appearing to be effortlessly graceful and detailed. The figures are gaunt, highly articulated and expressive. Sketchy and with an almost jerkily delineated look at the same time as they are meticulously precise and polished, these alluring illustrations effuse personality, and are perfect as modern interpretations of classic Gothic tales.
Abigail Larson has cited some of her biggest artistic influences as Arthur Rackham, John William Waterhouse, and Edward Gorey. See below for some more of her work!
Tags: abigail larson, alice in wonderland, death and the maiden, edgar allan poe, gothic literature, illustrations, modern fairy tales, neo-victorian, posters
MishMash [002]: Well-Dressed for the Apocalypse, Witchy Jewelry, and Modern Couture with an Edge
+ Swarovski crystal jewelry by Marianna Harutunian
Photo: Manny Serato
Model: Lacy SotoAnother picture here.
Tags: amanda lew kee, anatomical-themed, antiseptic fashion, artifice clothing, avant-garde goth, bevel nyc, bloodmilk, corsetry, haute couture, illustrations, jewelry, joan of arc, lacy soto, leather, mcqueen is dead, post-apocalyptic, skeleton, spine, spooky animal-themed jewelry, t-shirt designs, witchhaus, zoetica ebb
Eye-Love [004]
Twisted by Diego Fernandez
Cherryland: Candy by Ekaterina Augustina/Katja Faith
Mermaid I by Elisa Lazo de Valdez/Visioluxus Photography
Iceberg by Elisa Lazo de ValdezTo check out other “Eye-Love” posts, go here.
Tags: katja faith
Beauty in the Slaughter: The Art of James Jean
James Jean is a Los Angeles-based artist and illustrator. His brand of colorful, macabre, and wacky surrealism contains elements from mythology, Asian art, and anatomical illustrations; childhood, sexuality, and transformation are common themes. His style is fluid and graceful, often using soft colors that make the nightmares and scenes of grisly slaughter strangely friendly.
Tags: anatomical-themed, animals, children, illustrations, james jean, modern fairy tales, pastel, pop surrealism, soft color
The Otherworldly and the Liminal: Art by Eric Fortune
Eric Fortune‘s hauntingly beautiful, lyrical, photorealistic paintings, featuring statuesque humans or human-like mythical beings, convey a sense of movement, of epic vastness, and of illumination. The figures are often suspended in air, on the brink of falling, in motion, or reaching towards a source of light as towards some deeply powerful spiritual or inner discovery. They are always on some pinnacle; on the verge of redemption, destruction, crossing boundaries, or immolating enlightenment.
Tags: epic proportions, eric fortune, nature, otherworldly, statuesque, surreal
Poetry: “Dark Woods, Dark Water”
This wood burns a dark
Incense. Pale moss drips
In elbow-scarves, beardsFrom the archaic
Bones of the great trees.
Blue mists move overA lake thick with fish.
Snails scroll the border
Of the glazed waterWith coils of ram’s-horn.
Out in the open
Down there the late yearHammers her rare and
Various metals.
Old pewter roots twistUp from the jet-backed
Mirror of water
And while the air’s clearHourglass sifts a
Drift of goldpieces
Bright waterlights areSliding their quoits one
After the other
Down boles of the fir.
— Sylvia PlathTags: nature, sylvia plath, woods
Naomi Campbell/Alex Kovas by Mert & Marcus for Interview Magazine
These are from an editorial in the October 2010 issue of Interview Magazine featuring Naomi Campbell and a sadism/domination/torture theme. I love the contrast of the man’s pallid flesh and tattoos. The male model is Alex Kovas.
Tags: abandoned buildings, blood, dominatrix, fashion editorial, mag, sadism
Mary Kuzmenkova
I love photographer Mary Kuzmenkova’s flower headdress series, unnaturally-enlarged-doe-eyed portraits that are playful, sad, and moving, by turns. Below are some more examples of her work – I especially love the tenderness that she captures in her subjects, and I feel as if her work represents the zeitgeist of our age in some way, at least some part of it – a nameless, languid yearning.
Tags: "ethereal woodland maiden" look, black-and-white portraits, emotive photography, enlarged eyes, flowers in hair, mary kuzmenkova, soft color
Eye-Love [003]
Pandora by Tom Bagshaw
Amant Dormant by Tatiana Susla, aka mon-artifice or Lily Bloodstained
Capricorn Fields by Ekaterina Augustina, aka Katja FaithRelated posts:
Eye-Love [001]
Eye-Love [002]Tags: "ethereal woodland maiden" look, collage, flowers in hair, katja faith, lily bloodstained
