May, 2013
Mia Calderone
Ghostly, sinuous, beautifully illustrated apparitions with elongated, eerie, torturously expressive wraith-like hands figure prominently in Mia Calderone‘s exquisite and highly personal ink drawings. Her influences and inspirations include Catholicism, medieval illuminated Bibles, Art Nouveau (particularly Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley), and contemporary artists Takato Yamamoto and Laura Laine.
Tags: articulate hands, black and white, dark fairy tales, emotive, exposed anatomy, expressive, femininity, flowers in hair, ghostly, hair, inky, intricate line drawings, neo-victorian, sexuality, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, victorian
Jeremy Enecio
>>Jeremy Enecio<<
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, alien beauty, animals, creature, hauntingly beautiful, illustrations, mythology, realism, sexuality, surreal
Film Review: The Reflecting Skin
1990′s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, and quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of brilliant. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I loved it. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” quality/aesthetic, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.
Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and desolate, isolated, gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot very impressively and gorgeously), The Reflecting Skin is, sort of, about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow who lives nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unimaginable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and owning a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him not to understand these strange, horrific, traumatic events around him.
The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, and unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played pretty much to perfection by Lindsay Duncan. She should be an iconic figure, in my opinion.
This movie is fascinating, and even if you end up not liking it, you should definitely see it. The cinematography alone is worth it.
The entirety of the film (from the Japanese DVD) is up on YouTube.
Tags: 1950s, abuse, bizarre, children, cryptic, dark, film reviews, fragility, hauntingly beautiful, innocence, innocence/menace, macabre, metaphors, puritanical, religion, sexuality, strange beauty, surreal, surreal horror, trailers, vampires, visceral, witchy
A is for Arsenic: Taxidermia
Taxidermia is the new jewelry + apparel collection from Amelia Arsenic/Destroyx‘s brand A is for Arsenic. The black+white-color-themed collection features laser-cut perspex jewelry designs and T-shirts & tanks inspired by taxidermy motifs, Victorian memento mori imagery, and vanitas artwork. The photography below was shot by Melissa Jenkins, with art direction & styling by Amelia Arsenic. See the complete collection here.
{Taxidermia: a graphic world of dark Victoriana, memento mori and macabre taxidermy. Featuring vicious yet elegant designs with a nod to the past, Taxidermia is a thoroughly contemporary art jewellery and apparel collection created and constructed in London.}
Tags: amelia arsenic, animals, antlers, avant-garde goth, black and white, bugs, deer, destroyx, jewelry, macabre, neo-victorian, spooky animal-themed jewelry, taxidermy
