Sublime and Grotesque and all the art from it

Whilst exploring the multitude of old images I have to upload, I came across some I completely forgot about, and which were put into an Oxford Art Movement - https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=174343539211 - exhibition last year with the theme 'Sublime and Grotesque'. This reminded me of my friend Liza, and sometimes, looking at what we draw, there are some similarities. She draws largely in black and red, like myself, occasionally breaks into insane and disturbing paintings, and her themes include fruit with eyes and birdlike figures half Commedia dell'Arte and half Aubrey Beardsley.

Have a look at one of the reviews of the exhibition here -

http://www.cherwell.org/culture/art-and-books/2011/02/13/the-sublime-and-the-grotesque

And the posterwork she submitted for it (not the best quality upload, but you get the idea).

You can see, in this lovely photo taken in our second year kitchen back in England, the beautiful and talented Liza standing next to myself -cunningly disguised as a skeleton - in the black blouse. If you ever chance upon her in the street, make sure to ask her to see her pictures. 

I would very much like to get some sort of collaboration going while we're both in Italy, and thus will probably return to this theme at a later date, but for now I will upload some of the drawings submitted for the exhibition.

Tableaux

Recently I was asked by someone if I could put up my old drawings for people to see. I have quite a backlog of old drawings waiting to be posted so this will take a while, and thus I think it's best I do so in instalments.
I've been into an artist called Kara Walker for quite a while, and though I don't like to copy too much from another artist, I find her method and her themes intriguing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Walker
She essentially creates huge silhouetted tableaux based on old images from the days in which slavery was an accepted feature of life in the Southern States, and although they're extremely beautifully done (they're all cut out from huge sheets of paper and are very elaborate), the themes are extremely ugly - ironic comments on positions of sexual power and humiliation, suicide and brutality. I like the idea of portraying unpleasant themes with elaborate scissor or penwork, and I especially like the tableaux form - I'm quite into old devotional Christian art from the middle ages, old Dutch masters, etc, and they do a lot involving tableaux. I think that being exposed to a lot of this kind of art has definitely affected the way I draw and probably the subject matter, since I do tend to draw a lot of crosses, or general crusade-era violence.

A segment from 'Camptown Ladies', Kara Walker, 1998. This is a good example of how she portrays themes of sexual exploitation through the use of playful, yet grotesque, imagery.

As such, I have included a number of artworks inspired by - directly and indirectly - Kara Walker, and I will try to say a little about each one, and how they reflect her ethos. 

The central figure of this tableaux is the woman being ridden, rather like the silhouette in 'Camptown Ladies', which was a direct influence. Sex and violence are something I need to address purely because it's all-pervasive, and something I don't think people should shy away from with the ease they seem to, especially when it comes to combining the two. I was especially interested recently to hear of the 'Let's Talk About It' campaign formed in the wake of the Julian Assange sex scandal - http://johannakoljonen.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/lets-talkaboutit/ - and whether or not he is guilty of what he has been accused of, I welcome the journalists who have decided to not just make public their own experiences of the sexual 'grey are', in which nobody is accused of rape, but in which people feel humiliated and betrayed. For me, this is an extremely pertinent question - not just how we can classify rape, but how we respond to what you may choose to call sexual mistakes which, whilst not necessarily rape, can provoke the sense of humiliation and unease we find within Walker's images. There is a sense in the images of unease, abuse of power, which often crosses over into an actual act of violence - but sometimes this imbalance remains a threat, not actualised, and this to me mirrors the kind of relationships and occurrences addressed in the campaign.

Another tableaux not based on the images of Walker, but I suspect there may be some subconscious relationship with the image below.

One of Walker's more brutal images shows the suicide of a woman, an image called 'Cut' - both a vivid description of a suicide and a comment on the authenticity of her art, which is created using a razor blade to achieve the precise lines. 

None of the above images are specifically inspired by Walker, but thematically at least I felt that they should be placed with the above. 

Keeping a Nightmare-Diary

So this week, I've been having some rather odd dreams, and decided it would be interesting to try to note down a few of them.
The first, rather unwelcome, nightmare I encountered centred around an unpleasant serial killer called Alfred. I had decided to move to the suburbs, and it so happened that 5 minutes after the previous owner had given me the keys and waved me off with a somewhat sinister smile, the punctual police informed me he had in fact butchered several unfortunate individuals who were now hidden under the floor of my house, among other places. Oddly, the policewoman had sewn her own eye up, but wasn't prepared to talk about this. She had also given herself a facelift, but hadn't yet got around to removing the stitches. After this, she pointed out a strange area of damp rot under my sink. I knew immediately that there would be a body behind it, and was unsurprised to see an entirely preserved two year old boy, fully clothed, lying amongst the plumbing. I looked away, but when I looked back, he was horribly rotten. It soon transpired that the bodies were underneath my floor, bricked up in the walls, and underneath my mattress. She then took me to a forensics laboratory where I was given a guided tour of open graves and several quite nasty decomposing body parts. Needless to say, when I woke up I was far too scared to get out of bed for half an hour.

Bodies tended to be bricked up in the walls, but due to my dream giving me the power of X-Ray vision, I was able to see all these gruesome details. 

I thought a detailed diagram of exactly what happened would be interesting, since I usually forget dreams within a few weeks of having them.

Another, quite unpleasant, dream involved what I believe was Linate station in Milan, mixed with the Galleria Novecento. Every station in the dream looked exactly the same, very much like the front facade of that building. It essentially involved walking into the station, but being compelled to turn around by the sensation that I was being followed. A man was standing at the top of the stairs leading down to the station, waving at me, and for some reason I felt threatened by this. I stuck two fingers up at him, like you do, but couldn't stop seeing him on the train, everywhere. Having thought further about this I think it may have stemmed from a real incident in Bremen in which I was actually followed by a very strange and very nasty man, and had to shake him off.

Dreams don't have to be about being followed by people/living with serial killers. They can sometimes just involve casual nudity.

One nightmare I had is one I can, unusually, find a real cause for in day to day life. I recall when I was about 16, a boy in my school who I didn't know terribly well, but had seen around and occasionally had conversations with, was drowned in a cross-tide at a place we often went on holiday as a family. This meant that we ended up going a few weeks after he died, which was odd, knowing the place extremely well. That resulted, I suspect, in a nightmare about drowning. The floods in Genova which killed six people this week also made me draw lots of things to do with floods.

Dreams about a significant other can and quite frequently do turn into nightmares, but a strange dream in which we both appeared to be foxes provided some nice relief from the usual. I should stop reading quite so much Kafka, but this was at least a benign dream. 

It would be somewhat difficult and probably somewhat boring for me to recap exactly what I did for two months in Germany, even if I did leave out the Sundays (note for anyone considering a holiday - Germany shuts on Sundays. Yes, the whole country. If you don't believe this, read my wonderful friend's account of the German Bank Holiday/Feier'tage, and apply this to Sundays as well) - http://dmabroad.blogspot.com/2011/11/feiertage.html
However, inbetween Sundays, I did manage to discover a few things I should probably remind myself of. First of which probably should be the nudist beach.
THE NUDIST BEACH
I can't deny the fact that I have a slight exhibitionist streak. But the fact is that nudist swimming is actually a lot of fun. I'm not going to go too far into the physical aspect of quite how nice it feels to swim in the nip but bear in mind that this being Germany, they essentially created an artificial lake for old men with intimidating testicles to swim in, meaning it was warm even during a rainstorm. Warmth and swimming naked seems to remove all my cares in the world. Funny that. Maybe it reminds me of the womb in some sort of odd evolutionary throwback, so I will have to consult my Freud.
THE MUMMIES
In a slightly morbid twist, Bremen Cathedral - the St.Petri-Dom, incorporates a 'Bleikeller', or lead-lined cellar, in which, for some unknown reason, a number of mummified bodies were discovered in 1698. Amongst them, allegedly, are the remains of an English Countess and a number of soldiers killed in the Thirty Years War. For a small fee you can go to look at the bodies, apparently left there 'by accident' (?) and naturally preserved, and read several beautiful and profound statements about death written on the walls, which somehow jar with the gruesome skulls you can't stop looking at.
Ever since one of Goethe's friends snapped a finger off for a souvenir (Goethe refused to take it, but left it to his son), the mummies have been under glass. This led me to be inspired enough to create one or two mummy themed art pieces.

LA STRADA

After a work placement fell through, I decided to go to Bremen's artistic quarter, 'Viertel', and hang around the Lagerhaus looking like I needed work. I was subsequently taken in by a slightly loopy group of volunteers who needed help to organise a street circus. Some of you have expressed an interest in this slightly esoteric choice of work, so I think it may be time to describe one or two of the more memorable moments.

Since a lot of the clowns were in fact Italian, I was largely responsible for chatting to them and making sure the crowds didn't try to scale any tall buildings for a better view (which happened, frequently). In and amongst other acts, the highlight had to be the French duo who decided that it would be appropriate to perform an experimental piece exploring the death of their Mother in front of a group of children. This would have been fine had it not been for the fact that this performance involved an umbrella strung with dead birds, the attaching of a dead rabbit to a balloon, the subsequent explosion of said rabbit, and the insertion of a firecracker down one of the clown's underpants. This was by no means all of the performance but it does stick in my memory somewhat.

Naturally, this qualifies as a productive use of time for my year abroad.

In addition to this, I made a visit to Bergen-Belsen, which should probably remain the topic of another post, and attended an art course, which seemed to be populated entirely by art therapists, prompting questions regarding my general mental health and childhood. Despite this, it was a good opportunity to learn some techniques, notably the use of lime glue onto which a piece of pre-cut, thin material can be stuck to create a different kind of canvas.

I generally thought this was a rather realistic life drawing, but the art therapists seemed to think it pointed to psychological damage.

Clearly, working in a circus has left my desire to draw clowns in various states of undress largely untouched.

Pre-prepared canvas using lime and largely mangled quantum physics - living with scientists for a year has taught me some things. Again, this was looked upon with some concern by art therapists, but it's not my fault that my dreams consist largely of hairy ginger women.

Slightly harder to justify in terms of whether it points to a sound mind, but I like to think the sight of the dried and preserved bodies in the Dom had some impact on this.