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
Photography by Michaela Knížová
Tags: emotive photography, expressive, modern fairy tales, self-portraits
Fairy Tale Art by Courtney Brims
Detailed, delicate, and meticulously crafted, the beautiful, gently surreal drawings of Courtney Brims portray twists on fairy tales, featuring maidens entwined and fused with nature. She cites her influences as “Victoriana, ghost stories, old photographs, daydreams and nightmares.”
Tags: alice in wonderland, animals, flowers in hair, illustrations, little red riding hood, modern fairy tales, nature, realism, snow white, soft color, surreal, victorian, woodland creatures, woods
Swan Bones Theater: The Art of Kelly Louise Judd
Swan Bones Theater presents: creepy, Victorian-inspired, dark-fairy-tale-like paintings and sketches by Kelly Louise Judd. Thin frail little figures with spindly limbs and dolorous faces peer out at us through the dull dust of age, perfectly framed in their strange, uncanny little portraits and frozen in time. They are entangled in their own massive coils of braided hair, floating in dark staged spaces, watering the mournful desolate landscape with widow’s tears, and lying fallen upon the earthen floor of enchanted or haunted woods. Figures with deer’s heads are either their handmaidens or eerie guards. Crows, wolves, rabbits, owls, swans, and other creatures also have their places. Reminiscent of children’s books illustrations for a bygone era, these dark, austere, compact works have a quiet sense of yesteryear’s tragedy, melodrama, malevolence, and strange, lovely otherworldliness.
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, animals, hair, illustrations, little red riding hood, melancholy, modern fairy tales, neo-victorian, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, victorian, woods
Satanic Reveries: Paintings by David Stoupakis
David Stoupakis’ meticulously crafted, realistically rendered, colorful paintings contrast innocence with sin and corruption, and are reminiscent of medieval religious paintings, inverting that religiosity with a sinister perspective. His work reflects the influence of past, traditional art, evoking an almost classic sense of harmony, in the way that the paintings are composed and the backgrounds are rendered, and his subjects are also drawn from the Victorian era.
In my very humble opinion, Catholicism is the sexiest of the major religions, with the most striking visceral/visual impact, and Stoupakis uses his subversion of that element to create a sense of enthrallment and delight in his self-contained, perfectly framed paintings filled with symbolic objects and done in bold colors.
Tags: apples, children, classicism, cryptic, david stoupakis, innocence/menace, modern fairy tales, neo-victorian, pop surrealism, religious imagery, symbolism, twins/doppelgangers/doubles
Through a Veil Darkly: the Art of Bernd Preiml
Tags: bernd preiml, conceptual, fashion photography, gloomy color schemes, historically inspired, modern fairy tales, neo-victorian, otherworldly photography, photomanipulation, retro, surreal, victorian
Mandy Greer
from Zuster Sweostor Systir, 2010Mandy Greer creates impressive and intriguing installations/works of fashion art that have a gnarly and very intricate look, an effect that seems both ancient and synthetic, like overgrown crochet/knit flora and plant life, like an embodiment of folklore in a modern DIY aesthetic. She creates “mystically driven and darkly beautiful” worlds, the studied chaos of entanglements at once symbolic and material, and deals with motherhood, eroticism, human relations to nature, and mythology in her works. Impossible to exactly describe, take a look at the pictures below.
Tags: avant-garde, conceptual fashion, crochet, earthy, installation art, knitwork, mandy greer, modern fairy tales, mystical, mythos, nature, otherworldly, roq la rue, sinister arts and crafts, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, wearable art, witch-priestess
Toads and Diamonds: The Art of S.Jin
S.Jin‘s gorgeous drawings and watercolors contrast the daintiness of porcelain-doll Victorian girls with macabre sexuality, bruising trauma, and sinister anatomical metaphors. Her delicate, exquisite linework is sometimes accompanied by magical little poems and pieces of writing that exudes her fairy-tale aesthetic.
Tags: anatomical-themed, animal skulls, animals, antlers, bones, branches, bruises, deer, flowers, innocence/menace, intricate line drawings, modern fairy tales, nature, rabbits, skeleton, teacups, twins/doppelgangers/doubles, victorian
Death and the Maiden: The Art of Abigail Larson
Abigail Larson creates beautiful, Gothic-inspired illustrations, often depicting her favorite literary themes: the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Carroll, and fairy tales such as Beauty and the Beast.
Her neo-Victorian drawings, done digitally but emulating the look of ink + watercolor (her original medium), are highly stylized, fluid, haunting, and arabesque, appearing to be effortlessly graceful and detailed. The figures are gaunt, highly articulated and expressive. Sketchy and with an almost jerkily delineated look at the same time as they are meticulously precise and polished, these alluring illustrations effuse personality, and are perfect as modern interpretations of classic Gothic tales.
Abigail Larson has cited some of her biggest artistic influences as Arthur Rackham, John William Waterhouse, and Edward Gorey. See below for some more of her work!
Tags: abigail larson, alice in wonderland, death and the maiden, edgar allan poe, gothic literature, illustrations, modern fairy tales, neo-victorian, posters
Beauty in the Slaughter: The Art of James Jean
James Jean is a Los Angeles-based artist and illustrator. His brand of colorful, macabre, and wacky surrealism contains elements from mythology, Asian art, and anatomical illustrations; childhood, sexuality, and transformation are common themes. His style is fluid and graceful, often using soft colors that make the nightmares and scenes of grisly slaughter strangely friendly.
Tags: anatomical-themed, animals, children, illustrations, james jean, modern fairy tales, pastel, pop surrealism, soft color
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