DistantMirrors
Erik Satie - Gnossienne No.3
updated
Daniel began his art education at the age of 8 under the tutelage of his father, the respected artist and educator, Semyon Bilmes. Being immersed in art from such an early age had a profound impact on his personal growth and creativity, laying a lasting foundation of curiosity that continues to drive and inform his work today.
[from:http://www.danielbilmes.com/bio]
Music: Alio Die "Yearning In Beauty"
Varsam’s work often features esoteric themes that explore the mysteries of life, death and everything in between. He draws inspiration from various sources such as mythology, folklore and science fiction. This allows him to create art that speaks to people on many different levels.
The artist’s style is both whimsical and sophisticated; he has a talent for combining seemingly unrelated elements into one cohesive piece. Each painting invites viewers into a world full of wonder where they can lose themselves in the beauty of his creations.
[from: theinspirationgrid.com/lost-in-a-dream-illustrations-by-varsam-kurnia]
Music: John Foxx & Harold Budd "Raindust"
[from:https://zam.umaine.edu/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/nicole-duennebier/]
Natural phenomenon—dermoid cysts, fungus, invasive flora/fauna—and my love of candied, old-master opulence have a constant presence in my work. Through painting with attention to detail, I’ve become accustomed to the fact that nature itself, or anything living really, never totally allows you to have a perfectly idealized experience. Everything is always spewing, dripping, rotting a little. Similar to 17th century still-life paintings with those vibrant lusty fruits that show the light fuzz of beginning decay, I don’t see these works as allegorical depictions. To me it is more the realization that both the rot and the fruit are a textural attraction in their delicacy; both take the same concentration and care to paint.
The classic chiaroscuro darkness in still-life is a primordial soup, a pool of black that springs forth a decadent, and sometimes horrible, growth. I’ve always been attracted to the obsolete idea of spontaneous generation, all that awful stuff popping into existence for no reason. The paintings reflect this; they are more spontaneous generations than firmly rooted in actual living organisms.
[from:nicoleduennebier.com/about-boston-artist-nicole-duennebier]
Music: Alio Die "Veritas Temporis Filia"
Using his processes of alchemy, Arrivabene has transformed and reinterpreted classical, biblical and allegorical themes into a contemporary viewpoint. The new paintings draw from mythological stories and depict a transformative process in which inner suffering evolves into a desire for healing through a dream or divine intervention.
Arrivabene’s masterful paintings in turn can stop time and create suspended intense moments outside quotidian time. Arrivabene has written of his work as forming a wunderkammer or a “room of curiosities,” such as those created to display the trophies brought back by adventurers returning from foreign expeditions. This attention to the minutiae of his craft has resulted in Arrivabene’s paintings embodying a process of alchemical transformation, in which the physical matter of painting itself is transmuted into extraordinary light-filled visions.
Through the years of self-taught training, the artist not only uses a mathematical proportion of the Golden Ration in his works but also rediscovers traditional painting techniques and makes many of his works with artisan preparation of colors.
Arrivabene’s typical artistic expression is that he frequently works with light in depicting characters, human faces, nature and living or inanimate objects.
Arrivabene was able to observe reality from a peripheral view, constructing a language made of inscrutable representations and messages coded within literature, which lead to a hierarchy of deeper interpretative values. He says:
“I believe that history is a babel of knowing that is enclosed by human memory like a Borges-esque library. Everything that precedes us is like a cache of layered wisdom that nourishes new, still unexplored veins. The history of art has been able to sharpen the gaze and the search for the ideals of beauty, of harmony, and the mystery linked to these values. Art has become like a religion, and in these most recent years, artists have come to understand that we are like shamans, the perfect link between man and the imperishable, since before this period, art depicted religion, but now art is itself a religion.”
[from:dailyartmagazine.com/agostino-arrivabene]
Music: Tom Day "Hidden Landscape"
First video: youtube.com/watch?v=-VuWbPE9F-g
Kilians medium of choice when illustrating is digital, something he has developed and explored for many years now.
Elements that he often comes back to is the importance of color and lighting in a composition where geometry, the environment and organic shapes often is prominent. He likes to give his images a surrealistic touch and place the visuals in an alternative reality that hopefully evokes the viewers curiosity to explore and fantasize further.
His strongest artistic influences comes from many of the European artists who worked and is still working in the genre of sci-fi and fantasy with a very open mind what that can be.
[from: https://www.debutart.com/artist/kilia...]
http://dwdesign.tumblr.com
This is my last attempt at uploading my second video with Kilian's works. My previous ones have been copyrighted and blocked.
Part 1: youtube.com/watch?v=JRn7763FRjQ
Music: Chihei Hatakeyama, Hakobune "Vibrant Color"
[from:daylightcurfew.com/collections/kotaro-chiba]
Music: Bzaurie "The Church"
Bill's work is repeatedly commissioned by the world’s most significant and respected publications, institutions, and Fortune 500 corporations, His creations appearing in virtually every known medium including films, books, magazines, packaging, stamps, posters, and advertising; as well as one-man exhibitions. Regularly recognized for excellence, Bill is a consistent recipient of many of the industry’s highest honors; including over 500 National and International awards, and 21 Gold Medals from the Society of Illustrators New York and Los Angeles.
[from:behance.net/billmayer]
Music: Alio Die "Volo Metafisico"
[from:wowxwow.com/artist-interview/andy-kehoe-ai]
In art, creatives often either capture the beauty of their surroundings or render worlds of their own invention. Artist Andy Kehoe is one artist who brilliantly merges the two. He continues to depict alluring fantastical environments occupied by “human-animal hybrids and spirit creatures.” Each of his digital paintings offers a glimpse into a vivid setting complete with intriguing characters and narratives.
Kehoe is greatly inspired by art from Romanticism—the 19th-century art movement that emphasized emotion and drama. He tries to create a similarly magical atmosphere in his landscapes. “With a focus on imagination and emotional response as the source of aesthetic experience, my fantastical imagery evokes a sense of wonderment by emphasizing the mystery and grandeur of nature and the cosmos,” Kehoe tells My Modern Met.
While the artist's body of work is united by a theme of supernatural lore, each individual piece contains its own unique storyline. As the viewer admires the details of Kehoe's complex depictions, they can unpack an array of fascinating details that contribute to the mystique of Kehoe's paintings.
[from:mymodernmet.com/andy-kehoe-digital-paintings]
Music: Alio Die "Dissolved in the Grace of Presence"
Most people live in an urban environment and follow abstract tasks every day. You can lose the access and the understanding how everything is delicately connected. You can loose your humility, your respect and understanding."
Moki’s otherworldly imaginings display her remarkable empathy with the beauty of earth’s natural landscape and the urges we have all experienced to escape the confines of our everyday reality. Through the course of Moki’s career, she has confronted the boundaries of concrete existence and blurred the lines between the mental and the physical, allowing for the creation of a series of unique spaces of sanctuary, protection and solace. A sophisticated painterly skill is employed to give a staggering degree of reality to her paintings, no matter how fantastical the content may be. However, more recently Moki has been veering away from unreality, instead drawing inspiration from the seemingly endless sources of concern for the well being of many of planet earth’s creatures, including much of humanity. From this angle, her environments of security and retreat are arguably used to their full potential; to circumvent the harsher realities of life that many of the worlds inhabitants are forced to endure on a daily basis, often through no fault of their own.
Moki was born in 1982 in Brilon, Germany. She has been living and working in Hamburg since 2001, where she also graduated with a Masters Degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. Moki has earned a very well deserved reputation as within the international New Contemporary Art scene and continually exhibits her work both at home and abroad.
[from: https://wowxwow.com/artist-interview/...]
Music: Steve Roach "Home Now"
Carolina Zambrano is an award-winning Colombian illustrator, graphic designer and artist, working primarily with graphite pencil, fountain pens and acrylics.
Carolina explores topics related to the symbolic world, magic, alchemy and nature.
[from:theinspirationgrid.com/editorial-drawings-by-carolina-zambrano]
Music: Steve Roach "What Remains"
She was born in Carlton, Victoria, the youngest child of four and second daughter of the Rev. John Laurence Rentoul, an Irish-born Presbyterian minister and academic, and his wife Annie Isobel (née Rattray). At the time of her birth, her father was a professor at Ormond College, University of Melbourne, and later moderator-general of his church between 1912 and 1914. When World War I broke out, he became chaplain-general of the First Australian Imperial Force.
She was educated at Presbyterian Ladies' College, Melbourne. After she married Arthur Grenbry Outhwaite on 8 December 1909, she was generally known as Ida Rentoul Outhwaite. Before this, she had variously signed her work I.S.R. and at some point changed this to I.R.O. She also occasionally used I.S.R.O. and full spellings rather than abbreviations.
Outhwaite worked predominantly with pen and ink, and watercolour. Her first illustration was published by New Idea magazine in 1903 when she was just 15 years of age – it accompanied a story written by her older sister, Annie Rattray Rentoul. In the years that followed, the sisters collaborated on a number of stories.
Following her marriage, she also collaborated with her husband – most notably for The Enchanted Forest (1921), The Little Fairy Sister (1923) and Fairyland (1926). In a number of cases, her children – Robert, Anne, Wendy and William – served as models for her illustrations.
She died in Australia at Caulfield, Victoria in 1960.
In her lifetime, she inspired a number of artists including Edith Alsop, Ethel Spowers, and Ethel Jackson Morris.
Her work is depicted in four stained glass windows in an adjoining hall at St Mark's Anglican Church in Fitzroy, Victoria.
In 1985 she was honoured on a postage stamp, depicting an illustration from Elves and Fairies, issued by Australia Post.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd "L' Aventure"
[from: theinspirationgrid.com/embroidered-illustrations-by-michelle-kingdom]
My work explores psychological landscapes, tiny worlds in thread that capture elusive, persistent inner voices. Memories, histories, and mythologies collide amid an undercurrent of political turbulence. Entwined, these influences explore power, relationships and self-perception. Opposing dynamics of aspiration and limitation, expectation and loss, belonging and alienation, truth and illusion, are laid bare through symbolism and allegory.
Diminutive scenes are densely compressed into embroidered compositions. While the work acknowledges the luster and lineage inherent in needlework, thread becomes a sketching tool to both honor and undermine its past. Traditional stitches acquiesce to the fragile and expressive, where beauty is paralleled by melancholy.
[from: michellekingdom.com]
Music: Chihei Hatakeyama "Ocean To Ocean"
Inspired by the surrealists Rene Magritte and Quint Buchholz, Lee – the winner of the 2016 World Illustration Awards – hand draws his images with charcoal and watercolors before scanning and digitally layering them to reach the desired illusory effect. Wondrous and whimsical, the pictures are the next best thing to getting lost in a book.
[from:plainmagazine.com/korean-illustrator-jungho-lee-book]
Music: Hakobune "Love Knows Where"
The son of actors Martinius and Oda Nielsen, the artist was deeply immersed in the performing arts from a young age, a formative experience that was to influence the course of his career. With an aptitude for drawing and a passion for literature, Nielsen’s short-lived notion to pursue medicine was abandoned in favor of studying painting in Paris from 1906 to 1911. Nielsen’s formal art training began with French artist Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921) at the Académie Julian, followed by study at the Académie Colarossi under Norwegian painter and illustrator Christian Krohg (1862-1925) and French painter Lucien Simon (1861-1925), among others. In 1907 Nielsen interrupted his studies to travel to New York to accompany his mother, a celebrated actress and singer, on an extended performance tour of the United States sponsored by the Danish-American Society.
While a student of painting, Nielsen also devoted himself to illustration, creating stark black-and-white compositions in pen and ink, related to contemporary literature or inspired by personal experience. This dramatic body of work elicited an invitation in 1910 to exhibit his work at Dowdeswell & Dowdeswells Ltd. Nielsen moved to London where his first exhibition in 1912 included the notable but unpublished series The Book of Death, a sequence of ten illustrations meditating on Pierrot devastated by the death of his beloved. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Nielsen often focused on the melancholic or macabre elements of tales, and created visual sequences with themes of love, sexuality, loss and death.
Surprised by the intensity of emotion in Nielsen’s illustrations, contemporary reviewers often linked his work to that of Aubrey Beardsley or Carlos Schwabe. Today, Nielsen’s deep appreciation of illustrators active around 1890 to 1910 is evident—Carl Otto Czeschka and Edmund Sullivan come to mind—but the “originality” of his work and his “rare visionary power and imagination” was consistently noted from the start. The success of Nielsen’s first exhibition led to several gift book illustration commissions, and accompanying selling exhibitions, beginning with In Powder and Crinoline, a compilation of French fairytales, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in 1913. Nielsen’s Rococo-inspired vision resulted in both pastel fancies, as well as brooding, jewel-toned settings for some of the darker tales. A master of fairytale illustration described as “the only living artist who can draw a troll,” Nielsen’s work only occasionally included fairies, as he typically focused on creating dramatic settings for the stories’ protagonists.
Nielsen received greater international attention in 1917 with an exhibition at Scott & Fowles in New York, sponsored by Martin Birnbaum who noted the “genuine pleasure to reach the oasis of a Kay Nielsen picture in a journey through the printed pages of a book.” A portrait photograph of Nielsen in the accompanying exhibition catalogue shows the artist at his desk crowded with pens and pencils, brushes and paint pots. Somewhat staged, the image never nevertheless conveys the complexity of Nielsen’s artistic practice. Technical examination of some of Nielsen’s watercolors suggests a significant effort to plan the illustrations in advance, as the clarity of the initial outline in graphite is striking in confidence. Once the outline was completed, a dense color scape was created through highly controlled use of watercolor. Finally, the drawings were finished in ink, accenting the original outlines. In an example from his Great War series, the paper is scratched extensively to create highlights, further accenting the composition. It seems likely that Nielsen employed masking as a technique to ensure crisp definition. Overall, the works appear tightly controlled, yet in places there is a surprising looseness to his handling of color, and freedom to the decoration. Less well remembered today, Nielsen also worked extensively in pen and ink, creating countless monochrome line illustrations and margin decorations for all of his projects, published or not.
An internationally celebrated artist in his youth, Nielsen found minimal commercial success in the last decades of his life, eking out an existence with Ulla, between Denmark and California, with the support of a small group of devoted friends. In the years prior to his death in 1957, although plagued by poor health, Nielsen completed a handful of public painting commissions, including the school mural The First Spring, a monumental reflection of his artistic abilities as both stage designer and illustrator.
Meghan Melvin
Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Curator of Design Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
[from:societyillustrators.org/award-winners/kay-nielsen]
Music: Alio Die, Arianna Tondo "Air Sustain"
Hallie Packard's works depict a place nostalgic and foreign—comfortable and untouchable at once. A place through which the presence of humanity echoes, but from a source that has long since expired. Human-made relics interact with the natural world, confirming the question of previous human existence and conforming to—even mutating to become one with—the wildly organic environment surrounding them. As reminders of the wonder that abounds and the respect it deserves, these works are dedicated to rediscovering and cultivating the magic of this world.
[from:halliepackardart.com/copy-of-about]
Music: Aglaia "Vernal Equinox"
Born in Leitmeritz, Bohemia on April 10, 1877, Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin endured a traumatic childhood: at the age of ten, he witnessed his mother's agonizing death from tuberculosis; soon after, his father had married his mother's sister, who herself died within the year; before he turned twelve, he was subjected to sexual abuse by an older, pregnant woman. At fifteen, Kubin was apprenticed to the landscape photographer Alois Beer, although the experience was not salutary, and at its conclusion he attempted suicide on his mother's grave. After a brief stint in the Austrian army and another mental breakdown, Kubin began studying art, first at a private studio and then at the Munich Academy. It was in Munich that the young artist first encountered the work of Odilon Redon, Edvard Munch and Max Klinger, which profoundly inspired his own practice. In 1911, he joined the Blaue Reiter group, whose founding members included Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and participated in their 1913 exhibition at Galerie Der Sturm. Thereafter, he worked at a remove from any formal group or movement, living in a small castle on a medieval estate in Upper Austria. Upon the annexation of Austria in 1938, the Nazi's declared Kubin's work “degenerate,” but his reclusive nature allowed him to continue working through the war. In his later years, he was accoladed with the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Art and the Austrian Medal for Science and Art. He died in his castle on August 20, 1959.
Kubin's work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, and the National Gallery in Prague.
[from:sothebys.com/en/artists/alfred-kubin]
Music: Robert Rich "Fall Up, The Clouds Will Catch You"
In his early career as an artist, he produced still-life and landscape paintings, ex libris plates, stamps, cartoons for the satirical magazine Nebelspalter, posters, and portraits. He met his future wife Sibylle Oeri in the early 30s, and they married in 1939.
One evening, while working in his studio, he was struck by the image of a moth fluttering against the window. He painted this image in 1944, and later interpreted it as symbolic of his own state of mind: the moth, representing his soul, was struggling against the glass to reach the light, representing consciousness. This image precipitated a crisis in his career, resulting in a period of stagnation and depression.
During this period, he encountered works of C.G. Jung, and began to analyze his dreams. He and his wife entered Jungian analysis with Marie-Louise von Franz. Over the next 35 years, he collected and worked on over 3,400 of his dreams, discussing them with von Franz and corresponding with Jung himself.
As he interpreted them, his dreams often reflected images of himself as stultified by artistic tradition, and urged him to break with his previous stylistic constraints. In 1956, he achieved an artistic breakthrough with his painting The World's Wound, the first of a long series of works painted directly from unconscious dream images.
His new works were not well received by the Swiss art community, and it took several years before they would achieve sufficient recognition to provide Birkhäuser and his wife with a satisfactory income. Most of the initial support for his new work came from a younger audience, largely based in the U.S.
In 1971, his wife of 32 years died, and he developed a serious lung complaint. Nevertheless, he produced a number of his most significant paintings in the last five years of his life.
Birkhäuser died in Binningen in 1976.
In 1980, a selection of his later works was published in the book Light from the Darkness: The Paintings of Peter Birkhäuser, edited and introduced by his daughter and son, Eva Wertanschlag and Kaspar Birkhäuser, with commentary on the paintings by Marie-Louise von Franz. In addition to his paintings, the book also includes a 1970 lecture by Birkhäuser titled "Analytical Psychology and the Problems of Art."
I experience a power within myself which is not the same as my conscious ego. It has forced me to adopt a path quite foreign to my conscious attitude, a path which totally contradicted my will and everything I considered important. Before I was able to obey this power, I first needed to be crushed and almost destroyed. I often felt it was a pity this process had taken so long, but now, looking back over thousands of dreams and the sacrifices of a long, hard development, I can see how valuable the experience has been.
— in conversation with Dean Franz, ca. 1975
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die "Underwater Fields"
Natalie Wargin is a nature and landscape painter based in Cottekill, New York. Her paintings are narratives, each telling a story of the Hudson Valley landscape, focusing especially on the birds and animals that cross her path daily and the sense of inclusiveness in wild nature that these encounters create. Following a move from Chicago to upstate New York she discovered a completely different and surprising environment. Concrete and highrises gave way to woodland and farmland and mountains. The connection Natalie feels to her new home and to all the creatures moving around her not only places her firmly in the wide world but has also taught her to open her eyes and connect.
Her work is influenced by naturalists and nature writers like Henry Beston, Richard Louv, John Muir and John Burroughs, and explores her personal encounters with nature, birds, and animals.
Natalie received a BA in Communications Design from the University of Illinois. She had a graphic design studio in Chicago for over twenty years, working with both corporate and non-profit clients, designing for product and print. She began painting in 2013 and began exhibiting her work in 2017.
[from:http://www.nataliewargin.com/about]
Music: Steve Roach "A Few More Moments"
Having studied Fine Arts at ArtEZ University in Arnhem and later obtained a BFA in Drawing and Art History, Vooijs’ art is built upon a solid foundation, an experimentation with shape and form. “I like to see what happens when you cross digital stuff and layer that with traditional methods,” she explains on her website. “Building up and peeling pieces away or scratching my way back to the surface, until I feel that it might be time to step back and leave it alone.”
Though her pieces vary, the process is fairly straight forward and usually begins with an image found on the internet or in magazines. Often, these images become the physical basis for Vooijs’ work. Using digital sketches, prints, markers, spray paint, thread, and ink, she transforms the original images so that they reflect her life and her aesthetics.
“Some pieces took so long I almost gave up,” she relayed in an interview with Jung Katz. “Actually, I did repaint a lot of my work… sometimes it’s just the quickest fix and besides that, it’s budget-friendly. I also often work on a couple of pieces simultaneously.”
[from: mobispirit.com/building-up-or-peeling-away-dorris-vooijs-unique-art]
Music: Robert Rich "Never Alone"
She also studied for several months at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She then worked for nearly eight years as a graphic designer in the creative department of various communication agencies.
Painting, as a faithful friend, will always be there to accompany her to the point that she will end up, in response to a visceral necessity, devoting herself totally to her art.
At the end of 2006, she returns to the gallery and history gets carried away… Since then, she has been digging, digging, like an archaeologist, tirelessly questioning, through portraits, the infinite facets of the female soul.
She reveals the ineffable, wandering on the thread of the intimate, plays on its ramifications, its depths, its paradoxes…. Her painting reveals a “mastered”, rich, finely combined, vaporous glazes and subtle interplay of materials…on wood.
[from: thewomangallery.com/celine-ranger-born-1972]
Music: Robert Rich "The Sentience of Touch"
His all works are all created digitally yet with a rustic textures. Other than the role of an illustrator, he is a trombone player in two man band called ”repair” focusing on art project of poetry, picture and music. Hence you may notice the artworks are always surrounded by music theme and poetic vibes.
[from: phavourite.co/collections/akira-kusaka]
Music: Alio Die & Lingua Fungi "Lento"
Canadian artist Alexandra Levasseur lives and creates her narrative illustrations in Montreal. She received a Bachelor in Fine Arts and Graphic Design at the University of Costa Rica, and got her postgraduate studies in Creative Illustration and Visual Communication at EINA School of Art and Design, Barcelona, Spain, 2008.
The feminine figures represented in the illustrations, paintings and drawings of Alexandra reflect childhood memories and daily experiences in a dream-like space.
Her works has been exhibited in museums and galleries such as: Mirus Gallery, San Francisco; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Picasso Museum, Barcelona; the Barra de Ferro space, Barcelona. She is represented by Galerie ROCCIA in Montreal.
[from:http://www.thephotophore.com/alexandra-levasseur]
Music: Vidna Obmana "The Angelic Appearance"
I knew I wanted to do something related to arts. I have graduated from Graphic Design in Darmstadt, Germany and then worked for different advertising agencies in Germany, USA and Switzerland.
I stopped working in agencies after becoming a mother, and after a short time of being self employed I decided to quit work until my children grew older. Because of my children (4 and 6 years old) I can go through childhood again and I can enjoy the world of fantasy and fairy tails. I like to look at childrens books and let them inspire me. „Where the wild things are“, from Maurice Sendak is a favourite book of all of us. Through the children books I rediscovered the love to illustration again.
As a professional graphic art designer I often had to make compromises for the clients. There were a lot of rules in visual communication and I often felt that I could not express my whole creativity. Now I enjoy creating art that does not explain itself from the beginning. My images have a dreamlike and surreal quality. They speak from inner feelings which we often hide in our daily life."
[from: http://catrinwelzstein.blogspot.com/p...]
Music: Alio Die & Lingua Fungi "Giardinaggio Interiore"
“I am very interested in exploring the unconscious influence of childhood in our adult lives. When I paint, I use innocence and playfulness to explore my complex themes. My work is not about humans having a spiritual experience, but spirits having a human experience.”
[from: http://www.kathleenlolley.com/contact]
Music: Robert Rich "Refuge in Breathing"
Michael Broad studied illustration at Portsmouth University, earning 1st Class Honours Degree in 1999. He then moved to London to work as a commercial artist and made books in his spare time. One of these books caught the attention of a literary agent and his first publishing contract followed in 2005.
Michael has since written and illustrated over thirty books for children and these have been translated into many languages worldwide. His picture books have been nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal and the Stockport Schools Book Award, and his fiction has been shortlisted for the Nottingham Children's Book Award and the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize.
Michael continues to paint alongside book projects and his enduring fascination with stories has fed into a body of work depicting a large cast of characters populating dreamlike landscapes. He has recreated many of these characters as porcelain sculptures.
Michael’s paintings and ceramics reside in private art collections around the world and his work been shown in various exhibitions including the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.
[from: michaelbroad.co.uk/about]
Music: Alio Die "Electrostatic Forest"
Rudolf Kurz emigrated to Canada 30 years ago and divides his time between Toronto and the village of MacTier in Muskoka. He creates the etchings using a centuries old printmaking technique, without shortcuts such as photo transfer of an image to a printing plate.
His small, exquisitely detailed prints and offbeat, elegant paintings are inspired by surrealism and the art of Medieval and Renaissance Northern Europe.
[from: canadianartjunkie.com/2013/08/07/rudolf-kurz-delicate-but-macabre]
Music: Alio Die & Mathias Grassow "Winds From The Other World"
Her early works were inspired by the Quattrocenta style characteristic of the work of Piero Della Francesa, Masaccio and Giotto. Of greatest interest was the role of colour and mood, and the way these 14th-century masters applied paint to the canvas. These inspirations were combined with themes that wove throughout modern art and contemporary art history, as well as the immediate world around her. In her 2000 work Three Graces, an iconic painting of the Madonna is paired with a television set. For Waliszewska, the composition of the image is of principal importance. She also cites the works of Polish graphic artists from the 16th century: Tomasz Treter (1547-1610) and Jan Ziarnko (1575-1628) as greatly inspiring for a number of her works. One of her ambitions is to create a publication that would juxtapose their works with her own, illustrating the threads that connect them.
Moreover, in her paintings one can recognise compositions similar to those from Paolo Uccello's frescoes in the cloisters of the Santa Maria Novella church in Florence, or the atmosphere of Vermeer's interiors and even the mystical unrest of Giorgio de Chirico's works. Waliszewska's tasteful and aesthetic canvases brought recognition and first exhibition proposals even during her studies.
Her technique varies from a childlike nonchalance to detailed precision in her depictions of uncanny scenes of battling beasts, children lost in the woods, skulls and skeletons, portraits of faces with missing features or exposed musculature. A lone baby elephant would be sweet if not for the unnervingly evil expression on its face. Her works are unpleasant, often obscene, yet there is something magical about them that draws the viewer in and holds tight. She draws on a shared magazine of popular symbols from horror films, comic books, heavy metal and current events.
Waliszewska's works also inspire other artists across genres - most recently Greek film director Athina Rachel Tsangari, known for the award-winning independent film Attenberg (2010) made a film inspired by a series of drawings by Waliszewska. The Capsule was produced in 2012, along with an art installation, as a commission for the DesteFashionCollection 2012, sponsored by art collector Dakis Joannou. Immaculately filmed, with an enigmatic storyline, the production treads the fine line between art and arthouse cinema.
[from: https://culture.pl/en/artist/aleksandra-waliszewska]
Music: Alio Die "Imaginal Symmetry"
Part 1: youtube.com/watch?v=tWP_OKuVoSQ&t=233s
Karenina Fabrizzi is an Italian artist who lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina where she later studied her Fine Art and Graphic Design Degree, she went on to study in several European countries including Germany, Spain and London. A keen traveller, her training later took her as far as New York, a favourite city of hers, where she spent a period as painting assistant to the American Pop artist Jeff Koons. Karenina’s work has been exhibited all over the world and is held in many private collections internationally.
[from:curiousegg.com/artist-profile-karenina-fabrizzi]
Music: Alio Die, Remco Helbers "Entering The Intimate Fragrance Of Beatitude"
Albert Carel Willink was born on 7 March 1900 in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He was the eldest son of the mechanic Jan Willink and Wilhelmina Altes. His father was an amateur artist who encouraged his son to paint.
After briefly studying medicine, in 1918-19 Willink studied architecture at the Technische Hogeschool in Delft. Afterwards he left for Germany, where he failed to get into the academy in Düsseldorf. He later studied for a short time at the Staatliche Hochschule in Berlin.
Willink's earliest paintings were in an expressionist manner, although he also painted abstract works at the time that he exhibited with the November group in 1923. By 1924 he had adopted a figurative style influenced by Picasso's neoclassical paintings of the early 1920s, and especially by Léger. Later in the decade, Willink developed a magic realist style related to the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.
From 1935 until his death Willink lived in Amsterdam. His realistically rendered paintings frequently depict slightly disquieting scenes taking place in front of imposing buildings. He also painted many portraits.
Willink married four times. His first marriage in 1927 with Mies van der Meulen (1900-1988) dissolved after a year, but his second in 1930 with Wilma Jeuken (1905-1960) lasted until her death of a brain tumor. In 1962 he started a relationship with the 38-year younger Mathilde de Doelder, whom he married in 1969. Their eccentric relationship made them a mainstay in the Dutch gossip columns of the time. In 1975 Willink started an affair with the 44-year younger sculptor Sylvia Quiël [nl]. In 1977 he divorced De Doelder, who either committed suicide or was murdered 4 months later. The same year he married Quiël.
Willink died, at the age of 83, in Amsterdam on 19 October 1983. A small park in Amsterdam, near the Rijksmuseum, is named in his honour.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Robert Rich & Steve Roach "The Grotto Of Time Lost"
[from:johnbrosio.com/bio]
Music: Alio Die "La Ricerca"
Jacek was born in Torun, Northern Poland, and both his mother and father were students of the local Fine Arts Academy. His earliest memories are of the smell of paints, which were a part of his childhood. His father was the source of imaginative ideas, and his mother made them work through artistic means. Yerka’s paternal grandmother was his source of play and awareness of nature, while his parents were busy creating his awareness of the artistic world.
Jacek was often preoccupied during his school-age years, and chose to immerse himself in his own little world, by sketching and sculpting. His social interactions often consisted of being bullied, and he would sketch these bully peers instead of interacting socially. In an attempt to choose a different path than his parents, Jacek was going to attend college to study astronomy or medicine initially, but before taking the entrance exams, he turned to painting.
Jacek initially tried to develop contemporary painting styles from impressionism to abstraction. He found himself fascinated with colors, and therefore with artists such as Cezanne and Paul Klee. The fifteenth century artists and Dutch tablet paintings were also a great influence in his painting evolution. Artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and Jan van Eyck were great inspirations to Yerka. Jacek attended the Faculty of Fine Arts at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, and found himself also interested in graphic design.
Yerka was able to create clear and interesting messages, and enjoyed success on local and international levels as a poster designer. In 1972, his first poster won a prize, and he created many more successful posters before graduation. In 1980, Yerka painted exclusively, and fulfilled many commissioned works of art. In 1996, he added pastels to his typically acrylic works. Also in the mid 1990’s, Yerka was approached to do a science fiction film “Strawberry Fields”, which he designed art for. In a way the film was a depiction of his life as an artist.
Jacek Yerka draws on childhood memories and dreams for his subjects. The memories, places, and fragrances are displayed in pieces such as Between Heaven and Hell, A Hack at Dawn, Summer in the City, and Paradise in the Yard. Symbolic of his dreams are works such as New Age Manhattan, Metropolis, Strawberry Tree, Swimming Lesson, Cathedral, and Sonnet. Trips and visits to Polish countryside inns inspired the paintings Amok Harvest, Space Barn, Express Package, Full Bowl, and Jalousie.
Yerka typically begins his paintings with a graphite sketch, proceeding to a crayon drawing. Pastels are used before finally applying acrylic paints. His art is filled with vivid color, and is rich with imagination. The central figures in his art consist of trees, towns, houses, and water. Imagination is used to change the natural places of objects. Mountains may become waves, or rivers may run upwards. Yerka believes that nature is the determining force in human existence. His Flemish technique, sharply-focused acrylic application, and surreal placement of subjects make his style reminiscent of others, yet very unique as well.
Yerka’s art is exhibited and displayed in fine art museums in Poland, Germany, Monaco, France, and the United States. In 1995, Yerka was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist, and in 2008, an honorary plate by the city of Torun. With his father’s gift for unlimited imagination, Yerka is bound to keep viewers intrigued. He has named himself the Surrealist Cagliostro, yet his imagination is all his own, to continue to produce stimulating art.
[from:totallyhistory.com/jacek-yerka]
Music: Alio Die, Remco Helbers "The Garland Of Dissolution"
Tirtoff was born Roman Petrovich Tyrtov (Роман Петрович Тыртов) in Saint Petersburg, to a distinguished family with roots tracing back to 1548, to a Tatar khan named Tyrtov. His father, Pyotr Ivanovich Tyrtov, served as an admiral in the Russian Fleet.
In 1907, he lived one year in Paris. He said about this time "I did not discover Beardsley until when I had already been in Paris for a year".
Demoiselle à la balancelle is one of Erté's first sculptures, if not the first. Made in 1907, at the age of 15 years, during a stay in Paris. This work is less precise than his other sculptures, but still Art Nouveau. Erté considered this so minor and uninteresting that it does not appear in his official biography, but the cartouche on the back indicates 'ERTE PARIS 1907', in a triangle.
In 1910–12, Romain moved to Paris to pursue a career as a designer. In Paris he lived with Prince Nicolas Ouroussoff (December 17, 1879 – April 8, 1933) up until the prince's death in 1933. The decision to move to Paris was made despite strong objections from his father, who wanted Romain to continue the family tradition and become a naval officer. Romain assumed his pseudonym to avoid disgracing the family. He worked for Paul Poiret from 1913 to 1914. In 1915, he secured his first substantial contract with Harper's Bazaar magazine, and thus launched an illustrious career that included designing costumes and stage sets. During this time, Erte designed costumes for the Mata Hari. Between 1915 and 1937, Erté designed over 200 covers for Harper's Bazaar, and his illustrations would also appear in such publications as Illustrated London News, Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, and Vogue.
Erté is perhaps most famous for his elegant fashion designs which capture the art deco period in which he worked. One of his earliest successes was designing apparel for the French dancer Gaby Deslys who died in 1920. His delicate figures and sophisticated, glamorous designs are instantly recognisable, and his ideas and art still influence fashion into the 21st century. His costumes, programme designs, and sets were featured in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1923, many productions of the Folies Bergère, Bal Tabarin, Théâtre Fémina, Le Lido and George White's Scandals. On Broadway, the celebrated French chanteuse Irène Bordoni wore Erté's designs.
In 1925, Louis B. Mayer brought him to Hollywood to design sets and costumes for the silent film Paris. There were many script problems, so Erté was given other assignments to keep him busy. Hence, he designed for such films as Ben-Hur, The Mystic, Time, The Comedian, and Dance Madness. In 1920 he designed the set and costumes for the film The Restless Sex starring Marion Davies and financed by William Randolph Hearst.
By far, his best-known image is Symphony in Black, depicting a somewhat stylized, tall, slender woman draped in black holding a thin black dog on a leash. The influential image has been reproduced and copied countless times.
Erté continued working throughout his life, designing revues, ballets, and operas. He had a major rejuvenation and much lauded interest in his career during the 1960s with the Art Deco revival. He branched out into the realm of limited edition prints, bronzes, and wearable art.
Two years before his death, Erté created seven limited edition bottle designs for Courvoisier to show the different stages of the cognac-making process, from distillation to maturation. In 2008, the eighth and final of the remaining Erte-designed Courvoisier bottles, containing Grande Champagne cognac dating back to 1892, was released and sold for $10,000 apiece.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die "Seamlessly Bliss"
“Conduit: The Only Magazine That Risks Annihilation,” (No. 22, Spring 2011)
Born in Gary, Indiana, Gina Litherland has been active in the visual arts since the mid 1970s, exploring photography, performance, drawing and painting. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her paintings, drawings, and articles have been published worldwide in journals and periodicals. Her essay on the connections between creative activity and the natural world, “Imagination & Wilderness,” appears in Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (University of Texas Press). Litherland’s work has been the subject of a museum exhibitions at the James Watrous Gallery of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters in Madison, the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee in 2007, and several solo exhibitions at Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery in Chicago, most recently in 2013.
[from:ginalitherland.com/more-information]
Music: John Foxx & Harold Budd "Subtext"
Magic Realism is a style of painting where reality is mixed with magic. Rob Gonsalves’ work is categorized as Magic Realism. More specifically, his paintings have an autobiographical, symbolic narrative that invites the viewer into his beautiful mind where alternative realities exist at the same time. His work is a visual, human experience of quantum theory’s Entangled Spaces and Time.
Rob Gonsalves made paintings that spoke to the joyful and wonderous imagination of children and to us adults who can still find that inner child willing to swing so high that our shoes touch the sky.
Born in Toronto, Rob Gonsalves graduated from the Architecture program at Ryerson University and worked in the field for a few years before embarking on internationally acclaimed painting career.
His architectural studies gave him the skill sets to manipulate points of view, perspective and scale in 2-D and enabled him to bend and play with reality. His influences include Magritte, Remedios Varo, Kurerlek and the ProgRock album covers of his teens.
Rob Gonsalves drew from his own personal narrative. He was inspired by Toronto and New York architecture, the night sky and the rugged, Eastern Ontario landscape of rock, trees and lakes where he eventually settled in 2001.
Gonsalves suffered from mental illness and ended his life on June 14, 2017. His official Facebook page stated in part "Rob Gonsalves battled the dark but succumbed June 14th." He was survived by his wife and extended family.
Fellow artist and widow, Lise Carruthers organized an effort to preserve his legacy in 2018. In 2019, a 4-foot-high black granite plinth was installed on his gravesite at the Necropolis Cemetery in Toronto Canada. Each side of the pedestal featured a different porcelain reproduction of a Gonsalves paintings. Future plans are for a series of art exhibitions featuring Gonsalves original paintings.
[from:https://www.robgonsalves.live/about
https://www.robgonsalves.live/gallery
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Gonsalves]
Music: Eraldo Bernocchi, Harold Budd, Robin Guthrie "South of Heaven"
Vladimir Kush was born and grew up in Moscow, Russia. His father Oleg, a mathematician with artistic tendencies, encouraged his son’s natural talent at an early age. He also did his best to provide Vladimir with books of romantic travel by hard-to-get (and sometimes banned) authors such as Jules Verne, Jack London and Herman Melville, in the hopes that his mind would wander outside the grey world that encompassed him. At the age of seven, Kush began the formal training that led him to the Art Institute of Moscow where he furthered his mastery of color theory, composition, oils, and art techniques of all kinds. The school put forth what could be called the Cezanne method, and though Vladimir quickly mastered it, he then left it behind because form was lost in color and emotion took over where he felt the intellect should rightly roam.
After a mandatory stint in the Russian Army where he mostly kept busy painting large murals and portraits of generals, he briefly taught at his alma mater but found he could make more money (and have enough free time to explore his newly forming style) by painting portraits on the streets. It was there that he made connections with American embassy workers who helped ease his transition to the US after his first successful show in Germany in 1990 brought him to Los Angeles and eventually Hawaii, his home today.
Vladimir still visits Moscow often where the cold, dark winters force his imagination to roam, but the influence of the Hawaiian skies is readily apparent in many of his paintings. He sums it up for us: “Due to political and geographic restraints, I was forced to travel with my mind as a child, and it is this most of all that has shaped my artistic perception and voice, but I would likely never have painted the colors or clouds seen in my paintings if it hadn’t been for the sights of my tropical, second home.”
Kush has developed his own artistic credo that substantiates his Metaphorical Realism and which, above all, demands the following:
• Likeness, which is the evidence of high professional skill—it makes the viewer believe in the world imagined by the artist, as realism does in fiction and film.
• Avoidance of actual living forms, presenting the aesthetic object rather than emotional subjects.
• The use of deep irony to reach real aesthetic enjoyment, and as hammer to break apart old myths whose pieces will then be re-assembled in new forms, a process known as re-mythologizing.
He explains further: “I want to touch my audience on a much deeper emotional or intellectual level than would be possible by painting a pretty landscape or still life where viewers are tempted to place themselves in the landscape, or consume the bowl of fruit—the goal of realism is also its limitation. I try to provide layers of meaning for viewers to explore and emotionally respond to the discoveries they find in my art.”
The artist reaches for the realm of the incomprehensible where his knowledge will not be enough. He substitutes unreachable realities with metaphysical images; he throws a veil, hiding the essence. Otherwise, science would intervene, disintegrating the image and its beauty into components…what then would happen to Mona Lisa’s famous smile?
[from:artifactsgallery.com/art.asp?%21=A&ID=762]
Music: Alio Die "Honey Mushroom" Part 1
Dorothea Tanning was born on August 25, 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois. She attended Knox College for two years and later settled in New York, where she found employment as a commercial artist. The art director at Macy's was taken with her fashion plates and introduced her to the legendary gallerist Julien Levy, who gave her two solo shows and introduced her to Max Ernst, whom she married in 1946 in a double wedding with Man Ray and Juliet Browner in Hollywood. Having also forged friendships with Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dalí, Tanner's early work was closely associated with Surrealism, although she shrugged off the mantle of that terminology, as she did “woman artist.” Her paintings became more ambiguous in the 1950s and by the 1960s was nearly nonobjective. Ernst died in 1976, after which Tanning returned to New York and continued to work in visual art and poetry. In 1992, the New York Public Library mounted a retrospective of Tanning's works on paper; other major career surveys would follow at the Malmö Konsthall (1993) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000). Tanning died on January 31, 2012, at the age of 101.
Tanning's work is represented in the collections of numerous world museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.
[from:sothebys.com/en/artists/dorothea-tanning]
Music: Robert Rich "Generosity Of Solitude" Pt.1
During her 60-year career she has created a huge body of work including paintings, drawings, collages, illustrations and a selection of book covers that she designed. She was also a prominent member of the surrealist art movement.
A prominent female member (even as a man) of the prewar Czech avant-garde, the painter Toyen had a richly various career that took him from Cubism, through the painterly abstraction of “Artificialism, “to an extended Surrealist period.
Toyen rejected his name (Marie Cerminova) and chose to pursue his career as an artist under an assumed name – a mysterious name without a gender.
He broke all links to his family in favour of several friends who were “bound by choice”. Toyen protested against bourgeois tendencies and endorsed the anarchist movement.
He disclaimed any suggestion that he play a traditional woman’s role by leading an independent way of life and, on the other hand, displaying no compromise for the quality of his work.
Toyen regarded painting as a natural need free of any ambition and painted whatever came into his mind, often to what would have been a shock had people known he was a woman.. Another great hint in the little-known complexity of the artist’s long career.
After his death in 1980, an exhibition of his work and of the collaboration with his Czech colleagues was shown at the Centre Pompidou, and in the following years, a number of important retrospectives were held.
[from:http://www.tresbohemes.com/2016/04/czech-transgender-artist-toyen-aka-marie-cerminova]
Music: Chihei Hatakeyama "Ferrum"
“I believe that a good way to start this new age is by uniting the soul of each individual to that of his or her significant others close by. I feel that this is a process that will herald the birth of a new Japan. The passion of my work lies in conveying the Japanese spirit, with its deep roots in Bushido, to the next generation of Japanese.”
[from:graphicart-news.com/amazingly-lavish-illustrations-by-japanese-aya-kato]
Music: Chihei Hatakeyama "Hvit Tåke"
His often darkly themed works employ the dark earth tones of the early Renaissance, as well as some of the visual staging and precise rendering characteris.
[from: https://www.askart.com/artist_bio/Cla...]
Music: Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd "Smiling Apart"
I had been watching and examining for a long, long time, before all of this shaped itself, after many years, into conviction and painting. It all surfaced from subconsciousness. In the mean time I finished secondary school and begun studying technical school, where I gained secondary education. It gave me nothing, and did not fill even a little area of my brain hemispheres. I was feeling useless. Rationalism and routine, however, would have finally suppressed the psychedelic fever and would have feeded my minority complexes, if it was not for the striving of my subconsciousness. Taking it's roots in the childhood it bursted the frontiers of banality.
1990 was not only the year of sun eruptions, but also of my brain. My heart confessed to me and opened the gate of creativity. I crossed it, forever, without looking back, with no doubt, lost for shadow and disbelief!!!"
[from:safonkin.com/author.htm]
Victor Safonkin (born 1967 at Saransk) is a surrealist painter.Victor Safonkin's work is self-described as Eurosurrealism, or European classic surrealism & symbolism. His work is redolent of Salvador Dali. Victor's work has been highly acclaimed, and in 2005 he was invited to exhibit at the European Parliament in Brussels. The rock band Killing Joke used his 'Hosannas from the Basements of Hell' as an album cover in 2006. Viktor Safonkin is featured in the 2007 ["Venus and the Female Intuition,]" published by SALBRU. Safonkin has been called "one of the most brilliant artists I have seen in a long time," by master Surrealist Professor Ernst Fuchs.
[from:http://www.all-art.org/art_20th_century/safonkin1.html]
Music: Steve Roach "Begin Where I End"
The places I visit in my work are a product of my dreams, that are also bathed in this light. It is an emotional light, that can convey a feeling, a mood or an idea. It is the light of nostalgia, of a distant
memory, the light of the magical garden of childhood.
An image may come to me completed, can I hold it in my head, finish the painting before it fades? I don’t like to ask too many questions, to edit or filter. If I do, I am always left with just dust in my hands, or a less interesting painting.
I listen to the still voice within, the intuition, for guidance. The thinking I leave to the viewer. Meaning, might sometimes be wanting, or reason obscure, but there is often a power, a luminosity in a successful work that resists all clarification. I would never exchange that for the most carefully composed idea."
Jake was born in Nottingham, England, in 1964, and has been drawing since his early childhood. After finishing his education as an illustrator at the University of London in 1988 he decides to travel around Europe, which leads him to the Netherlands for the first time. During these travels he meets his wife Vanessa and in 1990 he decides to live in The Hague and to work as an illustrator. Inspired by the Dutch Masters he starts working with oil paint in 1992.
In 1996 he has his first solo exhibition. This exhibition is, much to his own surprise, such a success that it offers him the opportunity to paint on a full time base. Ever since he has had successful solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally and his work has found it’s way into many private and corporate collections.
Jake draws his inspirations from many sources: the Ancient Greeks, the Italian Renaissance Masters, the Dutch Masters, iconography, mythology, psychology and philosophy. But most of all he relies on his own subconscious and intuition which has proven many times to have a logic and curious independence of its own.
[from:jakebaddeley.com/about-jake]
Music: Alio Die "Il Portale Dell'invisibile"
To view the work of this acclaimed painter, sculptor and stone lithographer is to enter a meditative state, not of torpor but of heightened appreciation – a state of unmistakable marvel. Although Parkes scenes play out in a fantastic universe where the laws of ordinary space and time are transcended, meticulous care is given to depicting the inhabitants, whether angels, dwarves or heraldic beasts. Even the monsters are beautiful and have dreams and disappointments of their own.
Michael Parkes was born in Missouri in 1944. He studied art at the University of Kansas at Lawrence and upon graduation was hired as a lecturer in graphic arts. His early work was primarily in the Abstract Expressionist style. Parkes taught for four years at Kent State in Ohio and the University of Florida.
In 1970 he set off with his new wife, Maria, and $800 in savings. They traveled widely in Europe, then flew to India, Nepal and Pakistan. This was no sightseeing trip – the artist was educating himself in the philosophy, mythology and mystical imagery of many cultures, developing a foundation for what would later become the vocabulary of his magical style.
This style has sometimes been characterized as Magic Realism, wherein a sharply etched realism of depiction combines with fantastic, dream-like subject matter. Many of Michael Parkes' works were created as original stone lithographs, a uniquely appropriate medium to set forth his ephemeral dream worlds. In this demanding medium, successive layers of the original image are drawn directly on a 100-year-old Bavarian limestone lithography slab, than printed to paper on a vintage 1906 Heidelberg press. The original is created as the printing process progresses. Uncontrollable elements, errors and ghosts are constantly arising with their own suggestions of directions the artist has never imagined before but must incorporate.
[from: artifactsgallery.com/art.asp?!=A&ID=666#mm]
Music: Alio Die "The Mystical Ladder"
Virgil Warden Finlay was born and raised in Rochester, New York; his father, woodworker Warden Hugh Finlay, died at age 40 in the midst of the Great Depression, leaving his family (widow Ruth and two children, Jean and Virgil) in straitened circumstances. By his high school years, Virgil Finlay exercised his passions for art and poetry, and discovered his lifelong subject matter through the pulp magazines of the era--science fiction, via Amazing Stories (1927), and fantasy and horror, via Weird Tales (1928), beginning to exhibit at the age of 16. By age 21 he was confident enough in his art to send six pieces, unsolicited, to editor Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales. Once Wright determined that such detailed work would transfer successfully to relatively rough paper the magazine used (they were called "pulps" for a reason), he began buying Finlay's work. Finlay's illustrations debuted in the December 1935 issue of WT, and appeared in a total of 62 issues of the magazine, down to the last issue of the classic pulp in Sept. 1954. He also executed 19 color covers for WT, for issues from Feb. 1937 to March 1953.
Finlay quickly branched out to other publications after his 1935 debut; he was an immediate hit. In 1938 he went to work for A. Merritt at The American Weekly, moving from Rochester to New York City. Later the same year, he married Beverly Stiles, whom he had known in childhood in Rochester (Nov. 16, 1938). His adjustment to the city and to his new job was not smooth, however; he was fired and re-hired more than once. Yet during his period on the magazine's staff (1938-43), and later as a freelancer (1946-51), Finlay estimated that he did 845 different images, large and small, for Merritt's magazine.
Finlay served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and saw extensive combat in the South Pacific theatre, notably on Okinawa and did posters and illustrations for the Morale Services during his three years of military service. He resumed his artistic career after demobilization, doing a considerable amount of work for science fiction magazines and books. As the pulp magazine market narrowed through the 1950s, Finlay turned to astrology magazines as a new venue for his art.
Finlay also wrote poetry throughout his adult life. Virtually none was published in his lifetime, though significant samples have been printed posthumously.
Finlay had to undergo major surgery for cancer in early 1969. He recovered enough to go back to work for a time; but the cancer returned, and Virgil Finlay died of the disease early in 1971, aged 56. Finlay just missed a resurgence in interest in his artwork from the early 1970s onward. Both Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Inc. and Gerry de la Ree have published series of collections of Finlay artwork since the artist's death. The later books published by Underwood contain illustrations from the Gerry de la Ree editions, as well as additional material. A slightly later generation of fantasy fans were introduced to Finlay's art by reprints of his earlier work in the horror film fan magazine Castle of Frankenstein alongside the fine writing that gave significance to that magazine. Roads, a fantasy novella by Seabury Quinn, first published in the January 1938 Weird Tales, and featuring a cover and interior illustrations by Finlay, was originally published in a very limited edition by Arkham House in 1948. It was recently given a 21st Century facsimile reprinting by Red Jacket Press.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die "Cleaning Resonance"
In 1975 his career began to flourish as a professional painter and he returned to Turin, where he completed restoration techniques in Florence. His visits to Italian and Europeans museums enriched his experience bringing him in contact with masterpieces of distinguished painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer.
Originally his painting were characterized by figurative moments expressed with still life, landscapes, female nudes and other more surreal approches inspired by the fantasy worlds of Boris and the visions of Dalì. In some work, the romantic and Metaphysical component is extremely prevalent, fascinated by the artistic theories of Bocklin and De Chirico, who remained a constant reference throughout his career.
In 1983 he had the chance to make himself known in United States, exhibiting at the Artexpos in Los Angeles and New York. He also attended the atelier of Riccardo Tommasi Ferroni and in 1985 exhibited in Spello with Pietro Annigoni. The years are characterized by research and experimentation, through conceptual works signed under the pseudonym of Rascal Babaloo. He took part in Bergamo Biennale between 1986-1990. His participation in exhibitions in Tokyo (1990) and at New York Artexpo (1991) furthered his success and international recognition.
There was growing consideration of his paintings in many important institutions through the 90’s and increasingly qualified critics took an interest in him. Nunziante went forward with his research and in those years painted, “Nature Silenti”, an eternal masterpiece of Flemish art, testified in his first monograph printed in 1994. In 1996, at the exhibition “Il valore della figura” his works were shown with some Italian masters such as Boeri, Cascella, De Chirico, Guttuso, Modigliani, Morandi, Marino Marini, Severini and Sironi. Elements that were to become some of the constants in his work emerged: Metaphysics, Symbolism and Romanticism. That’s the period of “Farmacie Italia”, “Le stanze”, “Gli oggetti” and appears in “The isle od the dead” of Arnold Böcklin, a masterpiece which Nunziante will turn into an isle of love as an ideal space for mind and spirit. Simultaneously he exhibited in Florence, and afterwards in Lugano and Venice twice. The new millenium starts with the painting “Dimensioni parallele”, exhibiting in 2001 at the Boussex-Meaux museum in Paris, on the occasion of the exhibition “Hommage a l’Ile Des Morts”, together with works of Salvador Dalì and Max Ernst.
The works from these last four exhibitions in 2011 are considered the highest goals of his career. At the end of 2012 some of these masterworks, together with new ones, won over New Yorkers at the exhibition in Soho, titled 'Works'. At the opening, besides many leading figures of the art field, the Italian General Consule in New York attended, who chose five important works which will be exhibited at the Consulate until June 2013.
[from: tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2013/09/Antonio-Nunziante.html]
Music: Vidna Obmana "Before Mutual Grace"
In the Dreaming series, Daria Petrilli brings us into these fairy-tale worlds. In “Lady of the Red Ibis,” a woman leads six red ibises through a dreamscape, holding leashes tied around their long necks. Eyes down, she seems to be frozen in place. In "Dual Nature", identical twins look out from the piece with an intense gaze. One appears to be wearing a meadow, the other is dressed dramatically in black. Different in nature. In "Loneliness of an Anthurium", the solo laceleaf flower reflects the solitude of the protagonist whose head is, quite literally, up in the clouds.
Daria Petrilli digitally edits existing images, resulting in pieces of figurative symbolism reminiscent of classical painting. On her creative process, the Italian artist says: “I reworks photographs with digital painting interventions. I create a collage ... a triumph of Photoshop. I could have also used traditional instruments, but these illustrations were born as a personal amusement and I made them without the vetoes of a client and in the most immediate way.”
Daria Petrilli’s style blurs the lines between reality and imagination. With her singular visual vocabulary, she guides us into mystical worlds, making the subjects’ loneliness almost physically perceptible. The artist finds the balance between the Italian Renaissance and the subversive language of Pop Surrealism.
[from: lumas.com/pictures/daria_petrilli/dual_nature]
Music: Robert Rich "Generosity of Solitude" (Part 2)
Kilians medium of choice when illustrating is digital, something he has developed and explored for many years now.
Elements that he often comes back to is the importance of color and lighting in a composition where geometry, the environment and organic shapes often is prominent. He likes to give his images a surrealistic touch and place the visuals in an alternative reality that hopefully evokes the viewers curiosity to explore and fantasize further.
His strongest artistic influences comes from many of the European artists who worked and is still working in the genre of sci-fi and fantasy with a very open mind what that can be.
[from: debutart.com/artist/kilian-eng?tags=sci-fi]
http://dwdesign.tumblr.com
Music: Robert Rich "Veil Of Mist", Alio Die "Fragile Imagery"
Adam Has always found a great deal of inspiration from the classic Illustrations of Arthur Rackham, Edward Gorey and any intricate classic pen illustrations and print work. He has a great love of old stories and fairy tales and aims to tell a story through every illustration. In his work he strives to create a sense of nostalgia to take the viewer back to a forgotten memory, with the goal of reminding them of the soft magic that surrounds us.
The world he focuses on is a strange old place, lamp lit and cobble stoned, trapped in its own time with odd pieces of magic that creep in at the corners.
[from: http://www.adamoehlersillustration.com/about]
Music: Oophoi "Night Psalm"
[from: http://www.muddycolors.com/2019/05/ar...]
What kind of tools and painting materials do you use for drawing?
Drawing the rough sketch I use pencil and mechanical pencils. And I start to draw on paper by pigment-ink or on canvas by an acrylic pigment, etc.
You have so many art works, all very detailed. How long you take to create one piece?
About one week with a small one. It takes one month or more when it is a large one. It rarely happens for it to take several months.
What is your process to create art works?
Day by day the artwork is changed by meeting something and someone and what image stands up into reality, the dream, and the illusion. Even I am expected for the unknown expression world to be created while enjoying those meeting.
Did you decide the concepts and titles for each of your art books by yourself? Those books are designed beautifully. Do you imagine the design for books or have ideas to tell the designer?
Books take about two years to complete. The whole time, I’m thinking and discussing with the planner and the editor of the book. We overview the art works for those two years, and we figured out the theme and title for them. And then we are thinking about the structure of the book. Furthermore I’d add some new art works. About the book design, we also talk and focus the image for the design.
[more at: missmementomori.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/amazing-art-by-takato-yamamoto-2]
Music: Robert Rich "The Gate Is Open"
[from: http://www.muddycolors.com/2019/05/ar...]
Megumi Sakai: How did you get to be an artist?
Takato Yamamoto: I drew illustrations for commercial advertising, mainly in the 1980s after graduating from art university. In the 1990s, I had the yearning for UKIYOE to the cut-in illustration book, the work such as cut-in illustrations and cover illustrations of novels, and wanting to draw before increases. After 2000, I mainly worked on original paintings.
What inspires you as an artist? Which inspirations help you to make your stile?
My basic theme is the image of the universe operation that has repeated the circulating generation (life) and dismantlement (death). I express symbolically the image to be a man’s body as the main motif, while taking the image of a plant, an insect, and other various objects.
What is the process in creating one of your illustrations?
The character of the boy or the girl who becomes the face of the work is extracted from among the first hazy images. I multiply to imagine the image from that, and tie the form automatically, and then I start to draw the rough sketch of the line that becomes the blueprint of the work, is then made. After the rough sketch is done, I trace on canvas or paper and then paint.
[from:missmementomori.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/amazing-art-by-takato-yamamoto-2]
Music: Steve Roach "Present Moment"
Kittelsen was born in the coastal town of Kragerø in Telemark county, Norway. His father died at an early age, leaving a wife and 8 children in straightened circumstances. Theodor was only 11 years old when he was apprenticed to a watchmaker. When at the age of 17 his talent was discovered by Diderich Maria Aall, he became a pupil at Wilhelm von Hannos drawing school in Christiania (now Oslo). Because of generous financial support by Aall he later studied in Munich. However, in 1879 Diderich Aall could no longer manage to support him, so Kittelsen had to earn his money as a draftsman for German newspapers and magazines.
In 1882 Kittelsen was granted a state scholarship to study in Paris. In 1887 he returned back to Norway for good. When back in Norway, he found nature to be a great inspiration. He spent the next two years in Lofoten where he lived with his sister and brother-in-law at Skomvær Lighthouse. Kittelsen also started to write texts to his drawings here.
Theodor Kittelsen and his family settled in a home and artist studio which he called Lauvlia near Prestfoss during 1899. Kittelsen spent his best artistic years here. During this period, Kittelsen was hired to illustrate Norwegian Folktales (Norwegian: Norske Folkeeventyr) by the Norwegian folklore collector Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. In 1908 he was made Knight of the The Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav. However, he was forced to sell and leave Lauvlia in 1910 as his health began to fail. He was granted an artists stipend in 1911 but died a broken man in 1914.
Kittelsen's style could be classified between Neo-Romantic and naive painting. As a national artist he is highly respected and well known in Norway, but doesn't receive much international attention, which is the reason that his name is often not included in registers of internationally recognized painters and artists.
Lauvlia, his former home, is located north of Prestfoss along Route 287, with scenic view of Lake Soneren. The surrounding area, in particular Mount Andersnatten which overlooks the lake a few kilometres north, inspired some of Kittelsen's most famous landscapes. Today Lauvlia is a private museum featuring an exhibition of Kittelsens original work. Lauvlia is decorated with Kittelsen's own woodcarvings and murals. A new exhibition of original Kittelsen works is opened each year with painting and drawing activities arranged for children. The paintings exhibited are rotated each year.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Steve Roach "Your Own Eyes"