February, 2012
Two Animation Sequences
+ The beautiful sequence depicting the tale of the Three Brothers in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1:
+ A surreal stop-motion sequence from Tarsem Singh’s The Fall:
Tags: animations, avant-garde, creepy, hauntingly beautiful, movie clips, surreal
Margriet Smulders’ Exquisite, Paradisaical Flower Photography
These are just gorgeous. Violent and serene-looking at once, extremely vivid as well as unreal.
Tags: bloodmilk, colorful, emotive photography, flowers, hauntingly beautiful, red, saturated color, visceral
Band Posters by Jungle Cookie
Jungle Cookie is an artist whose style I love, and these are a couple of concert posters she’s created for her band TW!Am.
Tags: butterflies, flowers in hair, illustrations, posters, surreal
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty
A special exhibition dedicated to Alexander McQueen’s fashion designs will run from May 4 to July 31 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
{Pictures by Sølve Sundsbø}
Tags: art shows, avant-garde goth, conceptual fashion, dark romantic, feathers, flowers, haute couture, high fashion, mcqueen is dead, nature
Poetry: “The Rabbit Catcher” by Sylvia Plath
It was a place of force -
The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,
Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.I tasted the malignity of the gorse,
Its black spikes,
The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.
They had an efficiency, a great beauty,
And were extravagant, like torture.There was only one place to get to.
Simmering, perfumed,
The paths narrowed into the hollow.
And the snares almost effaced themselves –
Zeroes, shutting on nothing,Set close, like birth pangs.
The absence of shrieks
Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.
The glassy light was a clear wall,
The thickets quiet.I felt a still busyness, an intent.
I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,
Ringing the white china,
How they awaited him, those little deaths!
They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.And we, too, had a relationship -
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.- Sylvia Plath, 1965
Tags: confessional poetry, emotive, hauntingly beautiful, metaphors, poetry, sylvia plath
Poor Little Dears: The Sinister and Mysterious Childhood Depictions of Hikari Shimoda
Hikari Shimoda‘s creepy paintings of children depict them as sweet, sinister, wounded and abused. The eerie mouths, asymmetrical, strange little faces and one-eyed appearance (often one milky eye, one bruised and bloody-looking) of these alien but painfully familiar little beings, rendered in bright or pastel, almost child-friendly, but also quite subtly mixed and profound, colors, all serve to give a creeping sense of the corruption of innocent childhood, an inversion of the saccharine bliss associated with little children.
As Shimoda explains in her artist’s statement, “Contrasting with my daily cheerful demeanor, my unexpressed emotions accumulate inside of me. I feel like an outsider, isolated, lost, and have a hard time building relationships with others, but I never give up being part of the world. The secret to survival? Observe, feel, and listen to yourself. I stand in front of my canvas and confront it, releasing all the built-up unverbalized emotions, the chaos, and the unnoticeable darkness. Even though I know my contrasting side will be shone in the light with no place to hide, I paint to live and to be connected in this world. I accept and understand myself more through my artistic processes than anything else. As I know myself more, I can see others better.
My motif is mainly children. They are nobody, and yet, they could be somebody. They could be me as a small child, or they could be somebody’s inner child. Children, as ambiguous of an existence as they are, reflect my personal world and the universal problems that society today has.”
Tags: bandages, bizarre, bruises, children, colorful, cute n creepy little creatures, distorted bodies, dollflesh, injuries, innocence/menace, lolita-esque, mute, neo-victorian, pastel, surreal, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, unnaturally colored flesh, wound
Sub Rosa: The Art of Christopher Conn Askew
Chris Conn Askew’s gorgeous illustrations, prominently featuring the color red, filled with cryptic symbols, remind me of so many different influences, ranging from Soviet propaganda, to Japanese prints, to fables, Art Nouveau, vintage posters, tattoo art, and the Victorian era.
Tags: animals, aristocrat, blood, historically inspired, illustrations, modern fairy tales, posters, red, surreal, symbolism
Sas + Colin: Colin Christian
Colin Christian makes larger-than-life sculptures of space-girls, aliens, and femme fatale creatures, in a style I dub cyber retro-erotic which takes influence from many different subcultures. Statuesque and cast in fiberglass and silicone, these cartoonishly exaggerated, indomitably perfect figures with piercing, gigantic, pellucid eyes, featuring campy titles such as Adventures on Planet Freud and The Callgirl of Cthulhu, are a sort of oddball mixture of his diverse inspirations, including “old sci-fi movies, pinup girls/supermodels, anime,” and “H. P. Lovecraft.” I find some of his work to be not to my taste, bordering on obscene or downright creepy (not to say disturbing), but these pieces below I do like. Also check out Sas’ art in the previous post.
Tags: alien beauty, bizarre, cartoony, cyber aesthetic, distorted bodies, doll-like, enlarged eyes, erotic, fetish, futuristic, life-sized, lolita-esque, monsteresque, pinup, pop surrealism, realism, retro, sci-fi, sculptures, sinister arts and crafts, space girls, strange beauty
Sas + Colin: Sas Christian
Sas Christian is a painter of portraits of women who are beautiful but also just a bit dangerous or deadly, with their unsettling gaze, focusing unnaturally enlarged, glassy eyes, which are her trademark, on the viewer. Sas is often referred to in conjunction with her husband and fellow artist, Colin Christian (who I will do a post on a bit later). Sas + Colin are an electric duo in the contemporary art scene. Their art shares many similarities, with related themes running through it, but also differs quite dramatically. Below is a sample of Sas’ work.
Tags: enlarged eyes, expressive, innocence/menace, medical-themed, nurse, photorealism, pop surrealism, portraits, strange beauty
Flowers of Sickness: Marcel van der Vlugt’s “A New Day”
These lovely images are from Marcel van der Vlugt’s medical series A New Day. They depict the “flowers of illness,” so to speak, featuring nude women in hospital regalia (bandages, oxygen masks, bound limbs), among medical equipment, upon the operating and examining table, but simultaneously intertwined with, wearing, sprouting flowers, seeming somehow strong at the same time that they represent fragility and trauma, and suggesting that they are reborn, given new life in the midst of sickness and sterility.
Tags: art nudes, bandages, fetish, flowers, fragility, hauntingly beautiful, hospitals, injuries, medical-themed
