Miles Johnston
pixography reblogged
Frida Kahlo ~ A Few Little Pricks, 1935
A Few Little Pricks is based on a lurid murder that appeared in the local newspapers where Frida Kahlo lived at the time. A man stabbed his wife repeatedly in a frenzy of jealous rage and defended his act in court with the words, “But it was just a few little pricks!”. Kahlo shows the murderer standing calmly in the center of the picture above the corpse of his murdered wife. The painting seems filled with blood, on the bed, on the floor, on the murderer’s cloths, even on the frame of the painting. Black and white doves hold up a banderole with the murderer’s excuse. The pathetic quality of the excuse stands in stark contrast to the cold violence of the murder scene before us. Kahlo painted this during a very turbulent period in her marriage to Diego Rivera. Neither of them were models of faithful spouses. Both Diego and Frida had affairs and they both knew about it. Frida had affairs with men and women. Diego tolerated her affairs with women, but exploded into rage when he found out about her affairs with men. She suffered his affairs mostly in silence. Frida ended that stoic silence when she found out that Diego was involved with her younger sister Cristina. Kahlo moved out, and by 1939, the two artists were divorced.
Raoul Ubac (1910–1985) was active in the Surrealist movement during the late 1930s. His photographs appeared frequently in the Surrealist publication "Minotaure," alongside photographs by Brassaï, Boiffard, and Atget, as accompaniment to texts by Breton and other Surrealist poets.
Surrealism's efforts to tap the creative powers of the subconscious led them through a landscape of dreams, chance, sexual fantasy, and madness. Photography, essentially a realist medium, yet one with a remarkable power to distort appearances, was appreciated for its unique ability to force a rupture in the surface of perceived reality. "Convulsive beauty," Breton's term for this abrupt encounter with the subconscious, became the group's elusive, aesthetic ideal.
René Magritte - ‘Le Principe du plaisir (The Pleasure Principle)’, 1937
Le Principe du plaisir exemplifies Magritte’s interest with what is hidden in our visual reality. Throughout his career, Magritte employs surrealist imagery that confronts our fascination with the hidden—hidden faces in particular. An apple conceals the face of his iconic bowler hat man in Le Fils de l'homme while white clothes cover the faces of his subject in Les Amants. In one of his few recorded interviews (Magritte detested publicity and discussions of his own work), Magritte relates that, “Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible doesn’t show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is apparent” (quoted in D. Sylvester, Magritte: The Silence of the World, 1992, New York, p. 24). Magritte achieves this conflict in Le Principe du plaisirwith a characteristic twist of paradox: we expect, and need, light to reveal, not conceal, the subject’s face in an otherwise dark room, just as we expect the mirror to reveal, not conceal, the subject’s face in La Reproduction interdite.
The title of the painting refers to a key element of Freudian psychoanalysis, which served as a philosophical underpinning for the Surrealist movement. However, Magritte himself has warned against interpretations and analysis of his titles: “The titles of pictures are not explanations and pictures are not illustrations of titles. The relationship between title and picture is poetic, that is, it only catches some of the object’s characteristics of which we are usually unconscious, but which we sometimes intuit, when extraordinary events take place which logic has not yet managed to elucidate” (quoted in J. Levy, ed., René Magritte: Selected Writings, Minneapolis, 2016, p. 112).
Pablo Picasso - Femme Nue II (1902)
Femme Nue II, or Blue Nude, was painted during Picasso’s Blue Period which sprang from his early years of poverty during the time when he first moved to Paris. At this period in his life, Picasso was sad and melancholic and devoted himself to painting pictures of other lost souls, primarily using tones of blue. His attitude seemed to change and instead of observing people ruthlessly, he now treated his models with sympathy and tenderness. He began to paint solitary emaciated figures, usually alone against vague and empty backgrounds. Femme Nue II demonstrates this feeling well. The model is thin and turned away from the artist leading us to believe that she expects and desires nothing from the world, that all she hopes for is to be left in peace. Much like Picasso’s other paintings of this period, Femme Nue II represents a feeling of hopelessness and despair. It implies that her everyday reality is filled with hunger and misery. There is nothing in the painting to suggest that the woman expects anything more out of life. However, Femme Nue II does not depict a woman who is feeling sorry for herself or a woman who is ashamed of herself, despite the fact that she has her back to the world. Her posture rather suggests that she is happy to close her eyes and cover her head in order to perhaps dream of a better world than the cruel one she lives in. One senses that Picasso would have harbored the same hopes for the woman as those for himself.
pixography reblogged
1930 Gelatin silver print, printed circa 1970. 11 ½ x 8 5/8 in. (29.2 x 21.9 cm)
“To the developed mind that creates an image whose strangeness and reality stirs our subconscious to its inmost depths, the awakening of desire is the first step to participation and experience.”
- Man Ray
La Prière is arguably the signature image from the masterful series of nude studies Man Ray executed in the 1920s and early 1930s. In La Prière, Man Ray combines, with characteristic alchemic skill, the uniquely descriptive capabilities of photography with his distinctive vision within an image that is at once realistic and dreamlike. By the 1930s, nudes comprised an important portion of Man Ray’s oeuvre, and an entire passage of his first monograph, Photographs by Man Ray 1920 Paris 1934, is devoted to the female form. In La Prière, Man Ray poses his nude model provocatively and frames her carefully within the composition to create an image poised between the sublime and the sinister. As in the best of Man Ray’s photographs, conventional artistic subject matter is raised to the level of Surrealism. La Prière is a Surreal tour de force and has lost none of its impact since its creation in 1930. For this reason, La Prière is one of a few early works that Man Ray revisited, producing a small edition for the contemporary audience.
Golconda depicts a scene of nearly identical men dressed in dark overcoats and bowler hats, who seem to be drops of heavy rain (or to be floating like helium balloons, though there is no actual indication of motion), against a backdrop of buildings and blue sky. The men are spaced in hexagonal grids facing the viewpoint and receding back in grid layers. Magritte himself lived in a similar suburban environment, and dressed in a similar fashion. The bowler hat was a common feature of much of his work, and appears in paintings like The Son of Man.
As was often the case with Magritte's works, the title Golconda was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golconda is a ruined city in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, near Hyderabad, which from the mid-14th century until the end of the 17th was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region's legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a synonym for 'mine of wealth'." <source>
Carolina Gutierrez - Hand on Heart (2020)
“My paintings stem from the close, intimate observation of human skin-that place where personal history is printed and narrated in each spot, each crease, and each wrinkle. We are what is visible in our skin; that makes us readable and therefore vulnerable. My painting wants to explore that vulnerability, that risk we encounter when under the gaze of others. It also wants to create untold stories, to capture past experiences and future hopes or longings (always implicit in the image) in the sheer physicality of the present moment. That´s why I use animal skin as my canvas. I want to build the character out of the painting and the skin, to merge together as one and to tell one whole story. The skin itself, has its marks and scars, the same as the character in the drawing has. They are put together to complement each other and build a story”. - Carolina Gutierrez
Joan Miró - Femme, oiseaux devant le soleil (1972)
Joan Miró (1893 - 1983) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and famously declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.
Ania Tomicka - Antagonist (2020)
Ania Tomicka was born in 1985 in Łódz, Poland. When she was only 9 she moved to Italy, where she started to draw seriously: manga at first and realistically afterward. She attended an art institute and graduated in 2004. During her school years, she started to paint with oil colours, a technique that was soon to become her favourite.
René Magritte - The Voice of Space (1928)
Aleksandra Prusinowska - Dream (2010)
Aleksandra Prusinowska from Gdynia (Poland), born in 1986, is a graduate of the Fine Arts Academy in Gdańsk. Her oil paintings often depict images of night dreams. She is particularly interested in linocut techniques, thanks to which she tells stories about relations between people and environment in a very poetic style.
pixography reblogged
Salvador Dali ~ “Myself at the Age of Ten When I Was the Grasshopper Child”, 1933
Dalí had an irrational fear of grasshoppers, stemming from his childhood torment by other children, who often threw grasshoppers and other insects at him. When they appear in Dalí’s work, grasshoppers are used as a symbol of destruction, waste and fear. Dalí represents them with a fearful nature, as large and intimidating in comparison to the other figures, and they are often shown in the act of eating the main subject of the work.
David Michael Bowers - Flaming Cock (2010)
David Michael Bowers decided to give up a successful illustration career in 2004 to pursue a career in fine art. Now, instead of creating paintings based on copy from a publisher, Bowers has the freedom to create his paintings solely from his imagination. His realistic paintings have been described as a blend of Renaissance master and figural surrealist, with a touch of fantasy art mixed in.
Upon first glance Bowers' work seems to take you back to periods of painting long gone. However, Bowers' paintings incorporate modern themes and ideas. There is always a message in his work. For him the idea is the most challenging and rewarding part of the painting. Symbolism is a main ingredient in his work.
Miles Johnston - Death by Astonishment (2016)
Jeff Proctor ~ Blooming Skull
Illustrator Jeff Proctor dances the line between beauty and horror, creating work that is gruesomely captivating - Imagery of zombies, skulls, and flowers that encourage a shudder and smile.