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Category: Visual Art

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Tender Chimera: The Art of Takuya Mitani

Takuya Mitani creates delicate, detailed paintings portraying mysterious youths in a chimerical state. Accompanied by a myriad of strange creatures, flowers, emblematic objects such as Eden-like apples, mystical and heraldic imagery, they seem surreally transforming, or merging into their noble and enigmatic accoutrements. These symbols and articles revolve around and halo the lovely, tranquil beings whose very placidity seems to belie sinister interior layers. There are birds and rabbits and horses, as well as chimerae with their fantastical hybrid forms, and the subjects, too, seem chimerical, always transfigured, metamorphosing, or, as it were, marred by a grotesque yet ethereal blending with other elements in the images. There is also a motif of angels, with arched wings indicating a strange divinity for these tender youthful beings. Meticulously drawn, complexly composed, rendered with an eye to detail and a careful realism, Mitani’s paintings with their almost pretty air are provoking and lulling, combining an intriguing, soft, otherworldly aspect with historical and surrealistic elements.

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Luminous Procuress: The Photography of Steven Arnold

Steven Arnold’s playful and electrifying tableaux vivants incorporated elements from silent film, the Golden Age of Hollywood, Surrealism, and mysticism. His assemblages are whimsical, sharply contrasting, and delightful for a lover of film history. They are musingly clever and dreamy, evident of a masterful and fantastic touch. These stark black-and-white images exude a quality of theatricality and wild expressiveness, a sense of mischievous quixoticism, which is so striking as well as charming. I wish there were more contemporary artists like the late Steven Arnold. His wonderful photographs put me in mind of a still version of the work of filmmaker Guy Maddin.

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Mary Syring

Mary Syring is one of my favorite artists in recent years, and I have many of her prints in my home. Her very recognizable style draws inspiration from the Victorian and Edwardian eras and the 1920s, Spiritualism, horror movies, folk tales, and New England Halloween aesthetics. Endearing, piquant, and elegant, Syring’s illustrations are wispy and sinuous, giving a sense of daintiness along with a mysterious, enchanted savor of ghostliness. The beautifully coifed ladies, specters, vampires, and witches that inhabit her drawings are sweet, a little bit eerie, often sapphic, and invested with the poetic aesthetics of bygone eras. Candles, graceful little hands, ectoplasm, scythes and winged hourglasses are recurring elements in her work. The pretty demureness of Syring’s diminutive figures juxtaposes with the themes of death, passion, mourning, horror, and the supernatural. I love the ornate vignettes full of flowers which frame some of her images; they embellish them in such an interesting and lovely way.

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Massillon by Charbonneau + French

This hauntingly whimsical and melancholy series in collaborative photography by Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French is inspired by the life story of ancestor Zeta Eliza Woolley, “transposed through the surreal imaginings of the artists into a fairy-tale of suffering and unpredictable beauty.” Using film and traditional darkroom techniques, they explore the narrative of the life and death of Zeta in the town of Massillon, Ohio in the late 19th century. The resulting images are intensely dreamy, radiant, and sadly lovely.

I love the texture of these photographs, their poetic granular, luminous quality, and the surrealness which conveys both humor and a deep, abiding sense of sorrow. The sweeping vistas of a bleak, unforgiving beauty, the febrile impression of Gothic Americana, the symbolic depictions of the frustrating binds of a Victorian prairie existence…all of this is to me fascinating and full of a nostalgic, pensive evocativeness. These images feel informed by memory, dream, history, lore, family myth, and daydream. I also adore the name of the artists’ Website (“seven sisters asleep”).

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The Surrealist Bestiary of Marzena Ablewska-Lech

Marzena Ablewska-Lech, self-described as a Jungian reader and “collector of wounds,” is a London-based Polish artist. Intensely inspired by her dreams, her work often contains fantastical creatures, archetypes, ladies and beasts reminiscent of medieval and Renaissance art. Her works are like illuminated manuscripts with their small motifs, gold foil, and rich colors. The backgrounds sometimes give a sense of infinite convolution and entanglement; at the same time her depictions have a naive expressionism, and the curlicued, quaint forms which hearken back to illumination. Her style reminds me of a cross between old-school surrealists such as Remedio Varos or Leonara Carrington and medieval religious art – a strange and wonderful combination.

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The Drowning Woman: Surreal Photography by Kalliope Amorphous

The soft, dreamy experimental photography of Kalliope Amorphous, often featuring self-portraits, is a visual poetics, sometimes black-and-white, sometimes saturated with beautiful, nostalgic color. Techniques of distortion, doubling, mirroring, blurring, and multiple exposure are taken to the extreme, but come together to produce wonderful and arresting images that explore themes of identity, mythology, consciousness, and memory. The loveliness juxtaposes against the alienation expressed through them, such that the subjects are sometimes barely recognizable as human. Fragmented, unfocused, ethereal, fragile, as these murky portraits are, they are also spiritually radiant. Ophelia drowning in her watery bed, twins, and witches are some of the archetypes rendered tangible-but-dreamlike in Kalliope’s unique way. Ominous, tender, suffused with mystery, these images are a perfect fusion of melancholy beauty and striking experimentalism. They are so evocative, strange, hazy, and brilliant.

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Vile Creatures: The Art of Lindsey Carr

Lindsey Carr is an artist/illustrator based in Glasgow whose creations I find delightful. Having admired her work for many years, I love the direction that she’s taken in recent years – richer, more substantial, with bold yet translucent color. The antique, luscious, yet delicate qualities of her paintings filled with flowers, animals, and mythical beings lure the eye and enchant and refresh. Taking inspiration from Rococo art, still lifes of the Old Masters, and the naturalist illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, the gloss and glimmer of Carr’s painted world is refined as well as vibrant. Her charming, surreal, historically influenced style is eminently suited for depictions of chimerical figures such as Alkonost.

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Sarah Jarrett

Sarah Jarrett’s gently intriguing, melancholy collages combine strong color, imagery from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and a fabulous sense of surrealism. She is highly prolific, with a profusion of emotive collage works. Transposition, juxtaposition, silhouettes, and flowers all play a large role in her work. Lovely and mysterious and musing, the many layers and textures of her ethereal world draw the viewer in to its sense of tragic intimacy.

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Bea Bastet

The artwork of Beatriz Bradaschii contains a sweet surrealism. Flowers, insects, human teeth, and eyes all recur as symbols in a rich, gently melancholy world evocative of lore, both whimsical and macabre. Her Victorian-inspired, Wonderland-esque aesthetics, the imagery of a severed head, lacerated heart, exposed rib cage, carnivorous flowers, or pox-ridden countenances of haunting beauty, are rendered in a precious style, and speak of emblems of particularly feminine horror, as well as the terrors of childhood. Her highly imaginative, cunningly layered sculptures are also incredible – including Memento Mori Mushroom, which features a detachable face revealing a skull hidden behind it. I have one of her lovely clay pins, hand-painted in acrylic and gouache.

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