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
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
Eye-Love [007]
Photographed by Ben Hassett for Vogue Paris February 2008 {scan by Céline M.}Tags: avant-garde goth, bandages, cute/creepy little girls, dollflesh, fashion editorial, heart, high fashion, joao ruas, lost fish, medical-themed, pop surrealism, queens, self-portraits, white hair
Bandages and Trauma: The Art of Kwon Kyung Yup
Tags: bandages, emotive, expressive, flowers, hauntingly beautiful, pastel, photorealism, teardrops, trauma, white
“Anatomarie: The Autopsy Dress”
Click to enlarge A beautiful life-size sculpture/costume design by CL Martin.
Tags: avant-garde goth, bandages, blood, conceptual, evisceration, high fashion, injuries, mannequins, medical-themed, melancholy, neo-victorian, red
Eye-Love [001]
Mona Lisa Is Gone
DevonTags: anja millen, bandages, black and white, geisha-inspired, nick knight
Injured Children: The Art of Gottfried Helnwein
You probably thought this was a photograph when you first saw it (I definitely did); but it’s not. It’s an amazing painting by the renowned artist Gottfried Helnwein. His paintings are unbelievably photorealistic, and they often feature disturbing and provocative representations of children who are bloodied and injured, bandages wrapped around their heads: an allegory for innocence and trauma, emotional injury, the consequences of violence, abuse, and other scarring forces out in the world.
Categories
Search
Contact
© 2010-2011 Synesthesia Garden