RSS
Close

Category: Visual Art

b

The Night Forests of Tuesday Riddell

Cocoons, snails, snakes, birds, and insects populate the still yet intensely alive nightscapes of Tuesday Riddell. There is a glow in her works depicting the nocturnal life, death, and decay of forest creatures. She uses the long-lost technique of japanning in her delicate works, also often incorporating gold leaf and silver powder. This imparts the ghostly, ethereal feel to the illuminated plants and animals against their velvety black backgrounds. Riddell is inspired by Sottobosco painting, a 17th-century subgenre of still lifes which explored the forest floor and creatures of the undergrowth. The lovely little foxgloves, the sinuous ferns and stems and branches, all exude a subdued, almost phosphorescent light – the lustrous quality of her scenes conveys a sense of the mystery of nature in all its renewals and depredations. All this serves to create a unique effect which makes her lacquered and gold-pigmented paintings immediately recognizable, an impression of stillness teeming with slightly sinister life, as well as a certain flatness which is intriguing and evocative of historical art.

{See more}

b

Laura Makabresku

The nostalgic, saturated, slightly grainy photography of Laura Makabresku calls to mind the highly tactile quality of vintage snapshots and the beautifully composed splendor of Andrei Tarkovsky vignettes. Ordinary yet marvelous household objects, teapots, vases of wildflowers, religious items, candleholders, a bowl of strawberries – a room, steeped in honeyed, sweetly melancholy and golden light, from which the warmth of a remembered family member has just been withdrawn: all these well-worn fragments of a life add up to the ineluctable magic of the beloved everyday. They are visions of a lost yet imperishable past seen through the magnifying haze of memory.

{See more}

b

Nikolay Tolmachev

The delicate watercolors of Nikolay Tolmachev are playful, irreverent, and surreal. Taking themes from mythology such as Leda and the swan, as well as classical painting, Tolmachev creates juxtapositions that partake of the humorously absurd as well as the fragilely beautiful. He depicts limpid-eyed boys and girls with milk-white flesh, birds, angels, and flowers. With a largely pink, white, and red palette of flesh-and-blood tones, the exquisite mottling of colors which gives such a realism and also often lends a rosy flush to the subjects, has a tenderness that contrasts with the sometimes crude concepts of the images. These paintings are a bit eerie and unnerving, as well as wonderfully lovely and light. The ironic eroticism in his work seems to comment upon the lost (or perhaps never-existent) innocence of youth, the entanglements of romantic relationships, ties that bind, metamorphoses.

{See more}

b

The Writhing Anatomy of Melancholy: Artwork by Christina Mrozik

Christina Mrozik’s intricate drawings and paintings imaginatively fuse animal and plant life in order to explore inner worlds. Organic decay, exposed anatomy, unnatural amalgamations of natural entities are common features, with her signature delicate ribbony skeletons resembling grass. Sometimes the animals are wrapped around, shrouded, or embraced by a cage of the grass-like ribbons/bones. Birds emerge gruesomely from the exposed and lacerated throats of larger birds. The precisely drawn depictions of strangely hybridized, combined, distorted, multiplied, fractional creatures are wildly expressive, summoning specters of pain, beauty, and transformation. Snakes, rabbits, doves, seabirds with their merciless gaze…all are pitifully dissected and tenderly displayed, complexly mingled and interwoven, to illustrate phases of the human condition.

{See more}

b

Immortal Veil: The Art of Maëva Stancil

Maëva Stancil’s lovely dotwork drawings convey a sense of occult grandeur. A cold glitter of stars, skulls, sigils, moths, and sprays of flowers create a visual language for a mystical world made ominous by statuesque hooded figures and mysterious disembodied hands. The medieval combines with fantasy elements in a style that is spare, yet rich with the suggestion of arcane knowledge. Grim and somber as the strange figures are, their foreboding is offset by the fragments of nature surrounding them.

{See more}

b

Ghoulishly Beautiful Portraits by Roberto Diaz

The gory and rather sensationalist mixed-media creations of Roberto Diaz are wonderfully disturbing. Diaz combines traditional drawing with digital painting to execute darkly surreal portraits of dignified figures from past epochs, deformed by monstrous changes, additions, and appalling transformations. He uses a somber palette with warm, burnished tones which is evocative of the Old Masters, offset by the more lurid reds of the blood and grisly flesh. There is a constant tension and balance between the repulsive and the pleasing in all Diaz’s works.

A multiplicity of eyes, breaches in flesh, gaping maws, woeful signs of decay and ruin warp these subjects painted with a beautifully classical quality, who are often surrounded by a sort of halo or bubble of air. They are blessed – or kept alive – by graceful swirls of thin red tubes like veins or IV lines. The skeletal noses, stitches, and exposed subcutaneous flesh are reminiscent of rotting cadavers, while other distortions look as if their bodies had been cloven and fused back imperfectly. The tearfulness of some of these beings leads one to feel that they suffer terribly, with the ceremonial, grave sadness of those looking out at us from history. They possess the mournfulness and piety of old paintings, while at the same time they are corrupted by this macabre modern aesthetic which seeks to amalgamate and subvert all.

There is an alluring, palpable luster and glisten to the gore and viscera in Diaz’s paintings, the substance of the imperfect bodies. Unsubtle in horror, intensely impactful, the verisimilitude and level of technical achievement, the masterly chiaroscuro, draw in and seduce the eye. The juxtaposition between aesthetic pleasingness and sinister conception exploits our instinctual revulsion against perceived flaws and deformities in the human visage. This accomplishes a profanation of the allegedly divine, marries the lovely with the hideous, and evokes in us a delicious combination of disturbance and aesthetic gratification.

{See more}

b

Igor Skaletsky

Igor Skaletsky is an artist based in Tel Aviv, Moscow, and Berlin, who creates playful visual pastiches using a combination of traditional and digital painting and collage. His works ironically blend historical imagery and iconography with the aesthetics of modern high fashion. The resulting oeuvre can contain the somberness of an Andrew Wyeth landscape, the pious richness of the Old Masters, absurdly alongside satirical symbols of contemporary life and culture.

{See more}

b

The Glass Coffin: Liza Corbett Revisited

Below are some recent works from one of my longtime favorites, Liza Corbett. Her fanciful watercolors enchant me with their elegant, melancholy surrealism, sweeping, willowy lines, and languid Victorian ladies. I especially like the motif of eyes peering out of women’s skirts, as if their vestiture were a kind of morbid extension of their bodies/selves. Her delicately lovely images put me in mind of spiritualist seances, mythological stories where women are transformed into animals, and the membranous veil, as diaphanous as her art, between the living and deathly realms. I love the artist’s statement on her site, which elaborates:

{Liza Corbett’s work contemplates The Summer-Land, the spirit world that lays unseen alongside our own. She creates visual narratives populated with otherworldly women and animals, under heavy suns in hazy, wan skies. Her subject matter is tinged with the menace of pre-modern life and suffused with an air of melancholy. Influenced by nineteenth-century spiritualism, by Dark Romanticism, and by myths, fables and old tales, Liza aims to create images that, like tarot or other methods of divination, suggest a strange and impenetrable significance underlying our worldly existence.}

{See more}