Uploaded March 2019 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Denis Forkas Kostromitin (1977, Russia) explores mythology and religious symbolism through the ancient Mediterranean tradition of conveying images. Denis’s work is firmly rooted in the aesthetics of antiquity and he seeks to restore the interrupted artistic legacy of nameless masters by introducing contemporary techniques – notably acrylics, – in his process. The synthesis of tradition and innovation forms a framework for the artist’s studies of dreams and philosophy. Forkas’s works have been exhibited around the globe and featured in numerous international music releases as album covers. The artist currently resides in Moscow.
[from:fulgur.co.uk/artists-and-writers/denis-forkas-kostromitin/]
Music: Oöphoi "A Slow Beating of Wings"
Denis Forkas Kostromitin (1977, Russia) explores mythology and religious symbolism through the ancient Mediterranean tradition of conveying images. Denis’s work is firmly rooted in the aesthetics of antiquity and he seeks to restore the interrupted artistic legacy of nameless masters by introducing contemporary techniques – notably acrylics, – in his process. The synthesis of tradition and innovation forms a framework for the artist’s studies of dreams and philosophy. Forkas’s works have been exhibited around the globe and featured in numerous international music releases as album covers. The artist currently resides in Moscow.
[from:fulgur.co.uk/artists-and-writers/denis-forkas-kostromitin/]
Music: Oöphoi "A Slow Beating of Wings"
![Jungho Lee
These whimsical illustrations will appeal to bibliophiles thanks to their surreal use of books. Created by Korean artist and illustrator Jungho Lee, the images incorporate the beauty of books into everyday environments, creating thoughtful, dream-like scenes. As an open door, a star-filled lake, a morning slice of pie or an airplane’s wing, books take on new forms in Lee’s pieces without ever being read.
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:https://plainmagazine.com/korean-illustrator-jungho-lee-book/]
Music: Hakobune Love Knows Where Jungho Lee](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XVid7dhBIS4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Peter Birkhäuser
The son of an oculist, Birkhäuser was born and raised in Basel. His mother died early and he was brought up by his father in a rationalistic, agnostic environment. He wanted to be a painter from an early age, and left grammar school to study at an art school under Basel artist Niklaus Stoecklin.
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 Worlds 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 Peter Birkhäuser](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XnDmBApbiyk/mqdefault.jpg)
![Martin Lewis
Martin Lewis (7 June 1881 – 1962) was an Australian-born American etcher.
Lewis was born in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia on 7 June 1881. He was the second of eight children and had a passion for drawing. At the age of 15, he left home and traveled in New South Wales, Australia, and in New Zealand, working as a post hole digger and a merchant seaman. He returned to Sydney and settled into a Bohemian community outside Sydney. Two of his drawings were published in the radical Sydney newspaper, The Bulletin. He studied with Julian Ashton at the Art Societys School in Sydney. Ashton, a famous painter, was also one of the first Australian artists to take up printmaking.
In 1900, Lewis left Australia for the United States. His first job was in San Francisco, painting stage decorations for William McKinleys presidential campaign of 1900. By 1909, Lewis was living in New York, where he found work in commercial illustration. His earliest known etching is dated 1915. However, the level of skill in this piece suggests he had been working in the medium for some time previously. It was during this period that he helped Edward Hopper learn the basics of etching. In 1920, after the breakup of a romance, Lewis traveled to Japan, where for two years he drew and painted and studied Japanese art. The influence of Japanese prints is very evident in Lewiss prints after that period. In 1925, he returned to etching and produced most of his well-known works between 1925 and 1935 Lewiss first solo exhibition in 1929 was successful enough for him to give up commercial work and concentrate entirely on printmaking.
Lewis is most famous for his black and white prints, mostly of night scenes of non-tourist, real life street scenes of New York City. During the Depression, however, he was forced to leave the city for four years between 1932 and 1936 and move to Newtown, Connecticut. His work from this period includes a number of rural, night-time and winter scenes in this area and nearby Sandy Hook. When Lewis was able to return to the New York City in 1936, there was no longer a market interested in his work. He taught printmaking at the Art Students League of New York from 1944 until his retirement in 1952. Lewis died largely forgotten in 1962.
Lewiss print, Shadow Dance, sold for $50,400 at the Scenes of the City: Prints, Drawings & Paintings of New York 1900–2000 auction in New York on October 2010, setting a record price for the artist at auction.
The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, staged an exhibition of Martin Lewis prints in October 2011 drawn from the collection of Dr. Dorrance Kelly. The Bruce Museum said of Lewis: Recognized as one of the premier American printmakers of the first half of the 20th century, Martin Lewis left an indelible mark on the landscape of the art world. Lewis was an acknowledged master of the intaglio techniques of printmaking, experimenting with multiple processes including etching, aquatint, engraving and drypoint. A highly skilled printer, Lewis created magnificent impressions that captured the energy, bustle and occasional solitude of all aspects of city life in New York. With his remove to Connecticut in 1932, Lewis instigated another topic through his printmaking: country life. This firmly entrenched Lewis as a prominent America scene artist, who captured the intersection between the urban and rural environments and shed light on the slowly emerging suburban culture.
Institutions holding Lewis work include the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and others.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: Alio Die Intramundia Martin Lewis](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XvEzE1R87Vo/mqdefault.jpg)
![Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington OBE (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) was an English-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City, and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Carrington was born in Clayton Green, Chorley, Lancashire, England. Her father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, and her mother, Maureen (née Moorhead), was Irish. She had three brothers: Patrick, Gerald, and Arthur.
Educated by governesses, tutors, and nuns, she was expelled from two schools, including New Hall School, Chelmsford, for her rebellious behaviour, until her family sent her to Florence, where she attended Mrs Penroses Academy of Art. She also, briefly, attended St Marys convent school in Ascot. In 1927, at the age of ten, she saw her first Surrealist painting in a Left Bank gallery in Paris and later met many Surrealists, including Paul Éluard. Her father opposed her career as an artist, but her mother encouraged her. She returned to England and was presented at Court, but according to her, she brought a copy of Aldous Huxleys Eyeless in Gaza (1936) to read instead. In 1935, she attended the Chelsea School of Art in London for one year, and with the help of her fathers friend Serge Chermayeff, she was able to transfer to Ozenfant Academy in London (1935–38).
Carrington stated that: I painted for myself...I never believed anyone would exhibit or buy my work. She was not interested in the writings of Sigmund Freud, as were other Surrealists in the movement. She instead focused on magical realism and alchemy and used autobiographical detail and symbolism as the subjects of her paintings. Carrington was interested in presenting female sexuality as she experienced it, rather than as that of male surrealists’ characterization of female sexuality. Carrington’s work of the 1940s is focused on the underlying theme of women’s role in the creative process.
In Self-Portrait (1938), Carrington offers her own interpretation of female sexuality by looking toward her own sexual reality rather than theorizing on the subject, as was custom by other Surrealists in the movement. Carrington’s move away from the characterization of female sexuality subverted the traditional male role of the Surrealist movement. Self-Portrait (1938) also offers insight into Carrington’s interest in the ‘alchemical transformation of matter and her response to the Surrealist cult of desire as a source of creative inspiration.’ The hyena depicted in Self-Portrait (1938) joins both male and female into a whole, metaphoric of the worlds of the night and the dream. The symbol of the hyena is present in many of Carringtons later works, including La Debutante in her book of short stories The Oval Lady.
Her book The Hearing Trumpet deals with aging and the female body. It follows the story of older women who, in the words of Madeleine Cottenet-Hage in her essay The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos and Mansour, seek to destroy the institutions of their imaginative society to usher in a spirit of sisterhood. The Hearing Trumpet also criticizes the shaming of the nude female body, and it is believed to be one of the first books to tackle the notion of gender identity in the twenty-first century. Carringtons views of sexuality, however, differ from contemporary feminists in that she sees maternity as a key experience to femininity. Carrington stated, We, women, are animals conditioned by maternity.... For female animals love-making, which is followed by the great drama of the birth of a new animal, pushes us into the depths of the biological cave.
Leonora Carrington died on 25 May 2011, aged 94, in a hospital in Mexico City, as a result of complications arising from pneumonia.
[from Wikipedia]
My first Leonora Carrington video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDDc650j-zM
Music: Alio Die & Antonio Testa Honey Mushroom IV Leonora Carrington](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YAU8743KRzk/mqdefault.jpg)
![Wilfried Sätty
Wilfried Sätty (born Wilfried Podriech; April 12, 1939 – January 31, 1982) was a German graphic artist best known for his black and white collage art.
Born in Bremen, Germany, Sätty lived through multiple Allied bombings of Germany during World War II. Sätty later moved to San Francisco in 1965 where he got a job at Bay Area Rapid Transit as a draftsman. Later, Sätty began publishing his illustrations with East Totem West, a small poster and notecard company running out of the bay area. On January 31, 1982, Sätty died as a result of a fall from a ladder in his house.
He released two collage volumes, The Cosmic Bicycle (1971) and Time Zone (1973), as well as a number of other collections. His works have been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the National Museum, Warsaw.
[from Wikipeda]
Music: Alio Die Honey Mushroom Wilfried Sätty](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YKUK6oH9MU0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Camille Saint-Saëns - Aquarium
Le Carnaval des Animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) is a musical suite of fourteen movements by the French Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns.
Le Carnaval was composed in February 1886 while Saint-Saëns was vacationing in a small Austrian village. It was originally scored for a chamber group of flute, clarinet, two pianos, glass harmonica, xylophone, two violins, viola, cello and double bass, but is usually performed today with a full orchestra of strings, and with a glockenspiel substituting for the rare glass harmonica.
Saint-Saëns, apparently concerned that the piece was too frivolous and likely to harm his reputation as a serious composer, suppressed performances of it and only allowed one movement, Le Cygne, to be published in his lifetime. Only small private performances were given for close friends like Franz Liszt.
Saint-Saëns did, however, include a provision which allowed the suite to be published after his death, and it has since become one of his most popular works. It is a favorite of music teachers and young children, along with Prokofievs Peter and the Wolf and Brittens The Young Persons Guide to the Orchestra.
Aquarium
Strings without double-bass, two pianos, flute, and glass harmonica: This is one of the more musically rich movements. The melody is played by the flute, backed by the strings, on top of tumultuous, glissando like runs in the piano. The first piano plays a descending ten-on-one ostinato, while the second plays a six-on-one. These figures, plus the occasional glissando from the harmonica—often played on celesta or glockenspiel—are evocative of a peaceful, dimly-lit aquarium.
[from Wikipedia]
Artwork:Leonora Carrington Camille Saint-Saëns - Aquarium](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YVpl-RNzdE4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Rob Gonsalves
“I believe that there is real magic in life. Sometimes the experience of it can be dependent on one’s point of view. I have come to see the making of art as the search for that point of view where the magic and wonder of life appears not so much as an illusion, but as an essential truth that often gets obscured.”
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Gonsalves]
Music: Eraldo Bernocchi, Harold Budd, Robin Guthrie South of Heaven Rob Gonsalves](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YeKli79SJgQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![Yana Moskaluk
Yana Moskaluk was born in 1984 in Siberia, and moved to Moscow at nineteen to work at the Art.Lebedev Studio. Yana loves to travel, and draws inspiration from medieval art, ancient sculptures, old towns, legends, and fairytales. She takes the mood and atmosphere projected by such stories and items and recreates them in her own art within a modern context.
[from: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/yana-moskaluk/]
Music: Vidna Obmana The Space In-Between Yana Moskaluk](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Yl83jLBo1W4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Erik Satie - Gymnopedie No.1 (Orchestrated by Debussy)
The Gymnopédies, published in Paris starting in 1888, are three piano compositions written by French composer and pianist, Erik Satie.
These short, atmospheric pieces are written in 3/4 time, with each sharing a common theme and structure. Collectively, the Gymnopedies are regarded as the precursors to modern ambient music - gentle yet somewhat eccentric pieces which, when composed, defied the classical tradition. For instance, the first few bars feature a disjunct chordal theme in the bass - first, a G-major 7th in the bass, and then a B-minor chord, also in the lower register. Then comes the one-note theme in D major. Although the collection of chords at first seems too complex to be harmonious, the melody soon imbues the work with a soothing atmospheric quality.
Satie himself used the term furniture music to refer to some of his pieces, implying they could be used as mood-setting background music. However, Satie used this term to refer to only some of his later, 20th century compositions, without specific reference to the Gymnopédies as background music. From the second half of the 20th century on, the Gymnopédies were often erroneously described as part of Saties body of furniture music, perhaps due to John Cages interpretation of them.
By the end of 1896 Saties popularity and financial situation were ebbing. Debussy, whose popularity was rising at the time, helped draw public attention to the work of his friend.
Debussy expressed his belief that the 2nd gymnopédie did not lend itself to orchestration. (Orchestrations of this gymnopédie were only realised many decades later, by other composers, and without being frequently performed). Thus, on February 1897, Debussy orchestrated the 3rd and the 1st only, reversing the numbering:
First gymnopédie (original piano setting by Satie) → 3rd gymnopédie (orchestration by Debussy)
Third gymnopédie (original piano setting by Satie) → 1st gymnopédie (orchestration by Debussy)
The score was then published in 1898.
[from Wikipedia]
Artwork:Leonora Carrington Erik Satie - Gymnopedie No.1 (Orchestrated by Debussy)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YqKpAHvrOjw/mqdefault.jpg)
![Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre
Danse Macabre (first performed in 1875) is the name of opus 40 by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.
The composition is based upon a poem by Henri Cazalis, on an old French superstition:
Zig, zig, zig, Death in a cadence,
Striking with his heel a tomb,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zig, on his violin.
The winter wind blows and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden trees.
Through the gloom, white skeletons pass,
Running and leaping in their shrouds.
Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking,
The bones of the dancers are heard to crack—
But hist! of a sudden they quit the round,
They push forward, they fly; the cock has crowed.
According to the ancient superstition, Death appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death has the power to call forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle (represented by a solo violin with its E-string tuned to an E-flat in an example of scordatura tuning). His skeletons dance for him until the first break of dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.
The piece opens with a harp playing a single note, D, twelve times to signify the clock striking midnight, accompanied by soft chords from the string section. This then leads to the eerie E flat and A chords (also known as a tritone or the Devils chord) played by a solo violin, representing death on his fiddle. After which the main theme is heard on a solo flute and is followed by a descending scale on the solo violin. The rest of the orchestra, particularly the lower instruments of the string section, then joins in on the descending scale. The main theme and the scale is then heard throughout the various sections of the orchestra until it breaks to the solo violin and the harp playing the scale. The piece becomes more energetic and climaxes at this point; the full orchestra playing with strong dynamics.Towards the end of the piece, there is another violin solo, now modulating, which is then joined by the rest of the orchestra. The final section, a pianissimo, represents the dawn breaking and the skeletons returning to their graves.
The piece makes particular use of the xylophone in a particular theme to imitate the sounds of rattling bones. Saint-Saëns uses a similar motif in the Fossils part of his Carnival of the Animals.
[from Wikipedia]
Artwork: Remedios Varo Les Feuilles Mortes.
Played by: National Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor: Leopold Stokowski Camille Saint-Saëns - Danse Macabre](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YyknBTm_YyM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Jakub Schikaneder
Jakub (or Jakob) Schikaneder (February 27, 1855 in Prague – November 15, 1924 in Prague) was a Bohemian painter.
Schikaneder came from the family of a German customs office clerk. Despite the familys poor background, he was able to pursue his studies, thanks in part to his familys love of art; an ancestor was Urban Schikaneder, the elder brother of the librettist Emanuel Schikaneder. After having completed his studies in Prague and Munich (1871–1879), Schikaneder, alongside Emanuel Krescenc Liška, was involved in the furnishing of the royal box in the National Theatre in Prague; however, this work was lost in a fire in 1881. After his work in the National Theatre, Schikaneder travelled through Europe, visiting Germany, England, Scotland, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and France. From 1891 until 1923 he taught in Pragues Art College. Schikaneder counted amongst those who admired the Munich School of the end of the 19th century.
He died in 1924 and was buried in Vinohrady Cemetery in Prague.
Schikaneder is known for his soft paintings of the outdoors, often lonely in mood. His paintings often feature poor and outcast figures. Other motifs favoured by Schikaneder were autumn and winter, corners and alleyways in the city of Prague and the banks of the Vltava – often in the early evening light, or cloaked in mist. His first well-known work was the monumental painting Repentance of the Lollards (2.5m × 4m, lost). The National Gallery in Prague held an exhibition of his paintings from May 1998 until January 1999.
[from Wikipedia]
Music: William Basinski Vivian & Ondine Jakub Schikaneder](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Zfy5co83aoE/mqdefault.jpg)