beautiful memento mori paintings by Nina Rupena

I love what she has done with the stenciled lace and the yellowed sepia colours- like in faded photographs, faded memories. I think it looks like a mix of something spiritual and beautiful and something decaying and rotting. A perfect memento mori.. oh dear, I'm such a goth :)





The paintings are oil paint and stencil on canvas.

Sam

My friend Sam died recently. He was such a handsome guy with a heart of gold. He had infinite amounts of cute in him, was so fun to be with and had a contagious laughter. He did the best dance moves on the face of the planet. I can't believe I won't be able to see him again.

His sister asked me to do a drawing of him for his funeral, so I did this portrait of him:

I wish all the evil people would die first.
Life is unfair.

gothic paintings by caspar david friedrich

caspar david friedrich was a german painter who lived from 1774 to 1840. he was one of the most important painters in the german romantic landscape painting movement. i think his paintings seem strangely contemporary, in the way that they look like stills from horror films or kitsch goth clichés.. maybe i would have had an other impression if i had viewed them when they were made - at a time when there wasn't any horror films and goth clichés to associate them with? i still would have liked them though!



woo look at this, it's like something out of a horror film!:

some of his most important paintings are here at the national gallery in berlin! i haven't been there yet, but i'll definitely go.

illustrations by vania zouravliov

vania zouravliov is a MEGA talented contemporary illustrator from russia. he was a child prodigy and had exhibitions from the age of 13!!? i listened to prodigy when i was 13, but that is the closest i got to child prodigy..

taxidermy art by polly morgan

polly morgan's work is the super-coolest. she works with taxidermy, but not in the traditional way where the taxidermist tries to re-create nature/reality. polly morgan creates a fantasy, brought to life with the bodies of real animals. and i find it completely beautiful, serene and melancholic.

"Morgan won't call herself a taxidermist. 'I'm nowhere near as competent as the taxidermists I've learnt from,' she says insistently. Plus her ambitions are quite different. 'What [taxidermists] are trying to do is to recreate a wildlife image in 3D, a classic pose, something you'd see in the countryside. I am more interested in the moment between something dying and decaying - anything between a few hours and a week. There's something beautiful about that. The wings aren't used for flying, the eyes aren't used for seeing, the beak isn't used for pecking… it just becomes an ornament. When it's taken out of context, people can see that it's beautiful. They can appreciate it for what it is.'" link

i love animals. and death fascinates me. as i've said before, i'm not fascinated by violent death, by gore, i'm fascinated by peaceful death - the mysery that is important to understanding life. i've always wanted a taxidermy animal (i've got one now, from etsy of all things, but more on that later), i can see how it might be deemed a tasteless wish by some. i'm not a hunter, i don't want to show off my "prey" as a proof of my hunting skills- but doing so is maybe more acceptable than wanting a taxidermy animal because of a fascination of death.

i think taxidermy can be dignified as much as it can be tasteless, and in polly morgans case i find that it's totally dignified. she doesn't kill any animals for her work, it is all road kill and such. she doesn't portray them in a humiliating way. her work is all about the beauty - and melancholy - of mortality.

fantasy art by keith thompson

i have a soft spot for fantasy artists like keith thompson, it's like he's a modern day fairy tale illustrator. nowadays, fairy tales are mostly for kids, but it wasn't always like that, and it doesn't have to be that way. fantasy art and illustration has this stigma about it; as if it isn't real, serious, high art, but the domain of nerds. as we all know, being a nerd is being intelligent, dedicated and good at something - like keith thompson - i don't understand how that can be a stigma.

you might want to click on some of the more intricate pictures to get all the details, as the pictures are massive, but blogger resizes them to the point where some of the amazingness is lost.









for more of keith thompson's work, check out his website: www.keiththompsonart.com

wikipedia has a section about fantasy art where they also mention the silly division between fantasy art and high culture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_art

art on myspace

since i've started painting again (i didn't paint for a year!), i've been trying to breathe some new life into my dormant myspace art profile and it has lead me to re-discover some of the great artists on my friend list. this is the benefit of a bad memory; the same things can be discovered again and again and i'm equally thrilled each time... one of the artists that i keep re-descovering is korin:




i like how something so white can be so dark.. :

and i like the stale postures in her paintings:
i always find it interesting to see how people work, so here are a couple of behind-the-scenes shots:

taking good pictures to base paintings on is something i keep trying to remember. it's so much easier to work with something that isn't wrong from the start, as then the rest of the work doesn't have to be about fixing mistakes. it seems like a bit of an effort to take professional photos that will never be used for anything else than research, but it's more of an effort trying to make a painting based on a crap photo with shit lighting look professional..


check out korin's myspace profile for more of her art.

when i joined myspace, i was amazed at how easy it is to discover cool art there. if you find one artist that you like, it's very likely that you'll like other artists on his or her friend list. if any of my blog readers are on myspace, why don't you add me? you can find my profile here.

the somber illustrations of gustav dore

gustav dore illustrated such things as the raven by edgar allan poe, dante's inferno, paradise lost by milton and the bible. all dark stories, that he managed to make even darker in his illustrations. i think it's especially entertaining to see scenes from the bible this gruesome, although i guess back then it wasn't a subject to approach lighthearted.

bleak paintings by ken currie

scottish painter of the bleak, the dead and the ghostly.

he's got an effective technique going with the blue haloes around his subjects. it's not too hard to copy that effect with using a lot of blue in your background and fading the transitions, allthough i'm not saying that would instantly result in paintings like these.. it IS good though, for creating an eerie, cold glow.





look at him with his party finger going! i doubt that was what ken currie wanted me to get out of his painting, but hey, the artwork is only half created by the artist - the rest is created by the audience who views & interprets it..(and i clearly see a party finger). :
this last one is not a painting but a print: