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Category: Visual Art

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The Lost Surrealism of Remedios Varo

The beautiful, rich, luminous, and everlastingly mysterious paintings of Remedios Varo, one of the major female surrealists of the first half of the 20th century, have an almost precious precision and an effect of miniaturism. Enigmatic, sometimes comical, with an incredible depth of color, her symbolic imagery reveals a hidden world which is hauntingly lovely, an internal labyrinth, landscapes that gently unsettle and lure with their indefinable melancholy and sense of strangeness. Inspired by mysticism and alchemy, she also evoked a sense of claustrophobia, of cloistered and hushed, shadowy existence, of entrapment.

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Saintesses by Sad Riot

These are lovely interpretations of four female saints by Sad Riot: Lucy whose emblem is eyes on a golden plate, her eyes having been taken out; Philomena the virgin martyr who underwent numerous torments, scourging, drowning, being shot by arrows (and was finally decapitated), rather than become the Emperor Diocletian’s wife; Maria Goretti the eleven-year-old child, stabbed fourteen times with an awl; and Cecilia, who lived for three days after being struck on the neck three times with a sword.

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Dotwork Illustrations by Annita Maslov

Annita Maslov is an illustrator and a tattoo artist working at Heretic Studio in Melbourne, Australia. Her intricate artworks are delicate, enchanting, and macabre little vignettes. She takes inspiration from historical subjects and the occult, such as the Mercy Brown incident of 1892, in which a Rhode Island family was accused of vampirism and the bodies of its deceased members exhumed, with young Mercy showing little sign of decomposition and thus being deemed the undead culprit.

Her pieces remind me of old lithographs and combine cuteness with somberness in portraits of haunted, doll-eyed, flower-enshrouded girls haloed with the accoutrements of animals, feathers, and skulls; and modern Danse Macabres where the level of detail in the flowing drapery of a cadaver, or the waves of a restless sea, is amazingly precise and delicate.

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Tarot by Uusi

Linnea Gits and Peter Dunham are artists/designers who head the creative studio Uusi. The following tarot and oracle decks are transcendently lovely.

The Pagan Otherworlds tarot deck features 84 cards with images hand-painted by Gits and Dunham using traditional oils, and is inspired by nature, Celtic mysticism, and the “luminous beauty of Renaissance paintings.”

The 56-card Supra oracle deck, illustrated by Peter Dunham, is based on the mingling of Jungian psychology and Gnosticism. The images are at once mystical and personal, partaking of the austere surreality of a Huysmans novel, evoking the communion of the self with the self.

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Natalia Drepina

Natalia Drepina’s nostalgically saturated colors and sense of graceful melancholia suffuse her photography with a muted yet emotionally intense quality. Gentle, dreamy, and sometimes violent, these images are of nature, of earth, of blood, and depict grief and isolation with a poetic tenderness.

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The Wonderland Book

Kirsty Mitchell’s Wonderland Book is an enormous volume containing over 600 photographs, featuring the seventy-four pieces in her Wonderland series. It is a labor of love created in memory of her mother, who died from cancer in 2008, and took over five years to complete. These otherworldly images, lush, extravagant, super saturated with color, feature Mitchell’s lavish, wildly imaginative costumes and embody a fantastical, whimsical, and unrestrainedly vibrant fairytale aesthetic, inspired by the storybooks her mother read to her as a child and by her personal journey of grief and transfiguration.

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Witch-Ikon Book Launch and Art Exhibition

Witch-Ikon: Witchcraft in Art and Artifact is an upcoming publication from Three Hands Press, examining the iconography of witches and their magic through the centuries, to be released on October 28. There will also be an exhibition of contemporary artwork which is featured in the book, running from October 5 to 31 at Mortlake & Company in Seattle. I have long been fascinated by the witch as a powerful image and symbol, and by the history and aesthetics of witchcraft and diabolism, so this promises to be delightfully edifying to me.

“The figure of the Witch has haunted the margins of religion and spirituality for thousands of years, as a figure of transgressive spiritual power, outlaw magic, and alluring sexuality. Equally pervasive is her presence in art, from ancient depictions in the Near East, through the European Middle Ages, down to her present representations in occult subculture….Equal in potency to the figure of legend and romance are the magical artifacts which emerged from the varied traditions of malefic magic… The mask, the idol, the knife, the cauldron, the spirit-bottle, and a thousand other magical objects also serve, like the image of the witch herself, to embody a transgressive and beguiling aesthetic.

The exhibition WITCH-IKON brings together an international consortium of artists with varied esoteric and artistic backgrounds, infusing the witch-mythos with new imaginal vitality.”

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Fox and Raven: The Photography of Laura Makabresku

Laura Makabresku’s photography reminds me of stills from some lovely film, the type of utterly modern movie that’s in love with the past and seeks, with minimalism and airy grace, to elucidate a series of enigmatic, symbolic scenes in an atmosphere of restrained horror, an exquisite nightmare slow to unfold and penetratingly beautiful. The milky, delicate, startlingly clear palette feels both nostalgic and almost clinical, combining a severe elegance with a soft, ethereal fairytale quality. The imagery is enchanting and sinister, quietly eerie and lambent. It is like a tale of supernatural horror, of witchcraft, of woods, of murder, of treachery, of spellbound sleep, of ritual sacrifice – all watched and attended by the harbingers, animals of ill omen, foxes and crows and goats.

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