Hell House: The Art of Esao Andrews
Esao Andrews combines a colorful palette with a Gothic sensibility. Some of his paintings are twists on traditional portraits from earlier epochs akin to the work of Nicola Samorì. Wildly dilapidated and foreboding houses are a recurring motif, and, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson‘s psychological horror stories, depict the inner, psychical falling apart, decay, distortion, and warping. Fairy tales and folklore, including Pinocchio and Thumbelina, loom in the forefront with menacing or perverted appeal. In some works, his vibrant style illustrates the bizarre, the obscene, and aberrations, contrasting atrocious or monstrous things such as a giant, bloated black spider with a symbol of sweetness, purity, and elevation such as a child or an angel. Some of his illustrations are cartoonish, charmingly retro, with a dark, whimsical sense of humor, while others are realistically rendered and Dali-esque, while yet others are macabre and lovelorn, bloody tale-telling depictions.
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, dark, illustrations, innocence/menace, macabre, modern fairy tales, monsteresque, neo-victorian, pop surrealism, portraits, realism, religious imagery, spiders, surreal, symbolism, victorian
The Art of ジュウニコ
Tags: butterflies, dollflesh, emotive, expressive, flowers, hair, hauntingly beautiful, illustrations, innocence/menace, modern fairy tales, otherworldly, soft color, strings, sweet/melancholy, unnaturally colored flesh, visceral, wounded
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
Lost Fish’s Alice
These beautiful images are from the book Alice, à travers le miroir, a French edition of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There illustrated by Lost Fish (see my previous post on her).
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, alice in wonderland, children, cute little girls, dollflesh, fragility, historically inspired, illustrations, innocence/menace, lolita-esque, lost fish, neo-victorian, pop surrealism, porcelain, precious, queens, red and white, surreal, sweet/melancholy
Deathly Sweet: Macabre Ceramics by Maria Rubinke
Tags: babies, blood, ceramics, children, deer, dolls, innocence/menace, macabre, porcelain, red and white, sculptures, weird sculptures
Timothy Cummings
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, baroque, children, hauntingly beautiful, innocence/menace, medieval inspiration, neo-baroque, odalisque, realism, timothy cummings
The Art of Jodie Anne Candy
Tags: blood, bruises, children, enlarged eyes, expressive, hauntingly beautiful, innocence/menace, lolitaism, realism, saturated color, sweet/melancholy
Another trailer for Alice: Madness Returns
Here is a trailer, featuring gameplay, for Alice: Madness Returns, which was released earlier this month (making it the fifth and final trailer).
Alice: Madness Returns is released in the U.S. on June 14, and in Europe on June 16, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
I’m so looking forward to this!
Tags: alice in wonderland, american mcgee, colorful, cute n creepy little creatures, dark fairy tales, dreamscapes, gloomy color schemes, hauntingly beautiful, horror video games, innocence/menace, insane asylum aesthetic, insanity, madness, neo-victorian, psychological horror, surreal, trailers, victorian
Jana Brike’s “The Book of Taboo”
Jana Brike currently has a solo exhibit at ArtHatch in Escondido, California. Titled The Book of Taboo, this lush white-dominated, pink-tinged series focuses on prepubescent, androgynous girls and boys with milk-white skin and cherubic features, and portrays the theme of (yep, you guessed it) corrupted innocence. Lurid and twisted sexuality, eerie and sinister surreal imagery combined with the sweetness and purity of the diminutive figures, gambol and play in these portraits of children suspended somewhere between childhood and adolescence, between innocence and depraved malice. Jana Brike explains the influences behind these paintings here.
Tags: children, dollflesh, innocence/menace, jana brike, lolitaism, pop surrealism, sexuality, white
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
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