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: Sleeping Beauty
I saw this a few weeks ago, so this is kind of late, but here goes anyway. There’s “spoilers,” just FYI.
Sleeping Beauty (2011) is an Australian movie directed by Julia Leigh, starring Emily Browning and Rachael Blake. It’s about a young college student named Lucy who joins a high-end erotic waitressing service that caters to the wealthy, in order to make ends meet, and further agrees to be one of the “sleeping beauties,” so to speak, who form a more specialized subset of the girls. For each engagement she is driven to the madam/Clara’s house, where she takes a powerful sedative in a cup of tea that induces a very heavy, undisturbable, deathlike sleep for a short period, and while she’s out like the eponymous Sleeping Beauty, some client who has paid for the privilege, usually an older man, gets into bed with her and can do whatever they like with her unconscious body, short of actual penetration, for the duration of an hour. She is promised that when she wakes up, she will not remember a single thing, and for her it will be as if it never happened.
Tags: cryptic, death and the maiden, femininity, film reviews, hauntingly beautiful, minimalist, modern fairy tales, sexuality, trailers
Marcela Bolívar’s Ash Series
{Ash}>>Marcela Bolívar<<
Tags: emotive, foliage, hauntingly beautiful, hazy, marcela bolivar, modern fairy tales, nature, otherworldly photography, photomanipulation, silver, surreal
S. Jin’s “Black Moon Cult” Series
Egads! I just picked up a set of four 5.5×8.5″ prints of the mightily talented S. Jin’s Black Moon Cult series from her Etsy shop today. Gorgeous!
See the rest of the series below.
Tags: anatomical-themed, animals, bones, distorted bodies, exposed anatomy, flowers, illustrations, intricate line drawings, modern fairy tales, nature, religious imagery, surreal, sweet/melancholy, truncated forms
The Airy Photography of Brooke Shaden
Tags: art nudes, brooke shaden, distorted bodies, dreamscapes, hauntingly beautiful, hazy, levitating, modern fairy tales, otherworldly photography, photomanipulation, surreal
Image of the Day
Mercury II by Marcela BolívarTags: dark ethereal, hauntingly beautiful, marcela bolivar, masks, modern fairy tales, surreal, witch-priestess
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
Martine Johanna
Martine Johanna does gorgeous, highly detailed, melancholy, sometimes eerie, vividly surreal drawings and paintings. See lots, lots more below.
Tags: "ethereal woodland maiden" look, animals, colorful, hauntingly beautiful, modern fairy tales, realism, surreal, sweet/melancholy
Prose Poetry: “Darling, They’ve Found the Body”
‘Darling, they’ve found the body’ comes from a series of dreams – a body is buried beside a house, a house on stilts, the body has lain there for many years, i always knew it was there but consciously obscured it from view by willfully dimming the lights, the body is my body and i have been murdered by my ‘once upon a time’ lover turned keeper, i scrimshaw this dream onto liz bonami, the blonde dream doll with pernicious eyes lest i forget (when i lived on a boat my father would scrimshaw ships and birds and the letters of our names onto whales’ teeth we bought from a danish bank robber, we would sell these to buy food and make necessary repairs), my apparent self-imposed incarceration means i scratch messages onto the walls of my cell as i wait out my final hours, i try to make sense of the floating debris of letters, unpaid bills and medical records that seem surely to be a poor suggestion of a life, i self-portrait the face that accuses me and demands that i make good my escape, while i sit ludicrously passive watching the pot boil dry…
my sewing machine enables a solipsist god complex to spin out her own creation myth, where time stops and ‘the one who knows’ will come riding by on his ship, up the iron river and i will be waiting pretty as a picture so here i am, an impenetrable snaggle-toothed old crone stirring the secrets of my omniverse…the butterflies are notches on my belt as 39 years flutter by i am reminded of a dream where i live alone in a beautiful cottage in the forest in bavaria, by day i paint self-portraits with a solipsistic narcissism, by night i hunt, i am a wolverine i am reminded of another story – a woman sitting on her roof because of the floods, the water is rising fast, she has been told by God to wait there for a miracle, three times a man comes by in a boat to rescue her and each time she says ‘no, God has told me to wait here for a miracle,’ the water levels continue to rise and the woman drowns, when she gets to heaven she stands accusingly before her God and says why did you not perform the miracle that you promised me and her God says i came by three times and each time you sent me away
- KatieJane Garside, 2007
Tags: katiejane garside, lovely quotations, metaphors, modern fairy tales, stream of consciousness
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