Here’s a little self-isolation game for you. It’s like ‘Where’s Waldo’ but way more intellectual…
(* and yes, I know I’m conflating Surrealism here with Dada and general Avant-gardeism, but I liked it as a title! Enough with the quibbling!)
Tag Archives: art
Can you Spot the Surrealist*?
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Inktober: Faces Everywhere!
Inktober happens every October, it’s an online challenge to post a drawing every day for a month.
Now, I’m no artist, but I’m not afraid of drawing. I’m not one of the many people who decided “I can’t draw” at some point in childhood and except for Pictionary never doodle again. I can draw but I hardly ever draw. The only reason I even considered doing Inktober is that I have a daughter who is a dedicated/obsessive artist and loves online challenges. She jumped on the Inktober bandwagon so I did too. As other artists laboured over their work, composing, sketching, inking, colouring and shading, I sat on my bathroom floor for fifteen minutes every night drawing faces I saw in my floor tiles. Continue reading
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11 Things I Love About John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
John Berger died recently, and in the publicity wake of his passing I discovered that his Ways of Seeing was not just a fantastic book I had to buy for a course many years ago, but was originally a BBC series. A tragically short series, that is – there are only four episodes. I’ve just finished watching them on the youtube and enjoyed them immensely, both for the intellectual content but also for… Continue reading
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Weekly Eldritch: Naoto Hattori
Oh the internet! Where else can you easily find adorably freaky royal cyclops kittens?
Weekly Eldritch: Black Webs
I don’t think you need to be an arachnophobe to find this art installation creepy..
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Weekly Eldritch: Aron Wiesenfeld
Randomly roaming about the internet, I came across this image and followed it to the website of illustrator Aron Wiesenfeld.
The Crown, by Aron Wisenfeld
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Weekly Eldritch: Kingdok!
Last week it was a painting from 1515, this week a character from a 90s graphic novel: Kingdok from Bone.
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Weekly Eldritch: Saintly Temptations
Renaissance paintings of the lives of the saints – or rather the gruesome torments and horrible deaths of the saints – are definite precursors to the imagery of modern horror movies. The topic was a kind of license for the painters to all at once let their imaginations run wild, deliver proper religious instruction, and scare the absolute bejesus out of sinners.
Here’s a great example: “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” by Matthias Grunewald, painted sometime around 1515 .
The best part is that old Anthony doesn’t look too perturbed by it all.
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Weekly Eldritch: Arthur Szyk
Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1945) was one book we owned that really creeped me out as a child, partly because of the morose stories, but mostly because of the illustrations by Arthur Szyk (1894-1951).
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Weekly Eldritch: O Superman
I’m a Laurie Anderson fan from a way back when, and I was just listening to some old CDs when, as usual, O Superman gave me chills down the spine.
Laurie Anderson was a New York performance artist not well known outside art circles when this song became an unexpected #2 hit on the UK charts in 1981. Her live concerts were truly performance art pieces, using multi-media and plenty of (at the time) cutting edge electronic gadgetry. (I seem to recall she had a keyboard necktie that she could actually play…)
The song makes me think of dystopian science fiction, with the robot voice and cold, dispassionate lyrics. I just wanted to give you the audio file, but couldn’t figure out how to do that, so here it is via Youtube video. Enjoy!
P.S. A few months back I was surprised to hear this song coming over the PA system in my local grocery store. How perfect is that?
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