Used a photo ref off a gay eye candy site for this one. Shadows enhanced in PS. Getting totally into these bandit masks.

I’m so glad I stumbled across the works of painter Heather Nevay. Born in Glasgow in 1965, she studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Her paintings are rich and detailed and replete with symbolism, often featuring children (with faces like early Northern Renaissance portraits), surprised, as writer and film maker James Burge puts it, “in the middle of some incomprehensible ritual, staring out at us with hostility and contempt.”

The Sleeping Boy and The Mourning of Mister Lambe from Nevay’s exhibition this month at The Portal Gallery.

Nevay says: “I’m interested in the games in which children take part which fall into traditional roles and activities. I look at the duplicity of the play which is often the cause of misinterpretation of adult onlookers. I am not storytelling but I want to offer a glimpse of a scene which will continue after our gaze has moved on. I don’t want to paint horrific scenes, but sometimes I have to create an atmosphere of uncomfortable feelings.”

Heather Nevay’s home page — lots of pictures, and the bio includes the article quoted above.

Some of you may remember the picture with the blindfold (completely utterly unsafe for work, unless you work in a whorehouse).

The blindfold is back. I needed a model, really — looked at a few photos but couldn’t find a figure in this position.

Anatomy and %$@#! hands aside, I kinda like what I did here. Might explore this direction some more. (I know: first no eyes, now no nose or mouth. I was inspired by Duncan Regehr’s drawings of Zorro, who he also played on TV. Little did I know, when in the first budding of my sexuality I went batshit for Dirk Blackpool (for younger viewers, yes, men really did wear their hair like that in 1983), that the actor playing him was an accomplished artist. I suddenly have a jones to watch W&W again… )

This has been a challenging year, physically and mentally. I think this picture I drew this morning says something about it. The minotaur might be the animus (because I always seem to express myself through the animus when there’s something wrong), and the moon, I’m pretty sure, is psychological disturbance:

The blood spatter was an accidental blot, so I did more blotty shading with my fingers, which I’ve never tried before. Then used a makeup brush, which worked quite well, except that there was eyeshadow on it which came off in the ink, so that there’s a silvery bit on the original. Background tones added in PS, as the paper was too flimsy for a wash.

This poor minotaur needs another drawing. He needs his arms and his right hind leg. But I like the blotty shading, although I could have planned the tones a little better.

In addition to Who Killed Bambi, which I’ve mentioned before, in hunting around for images by Aloise Corbaz I found two other art sites that I really like, Artminut and Random Index. Artminut in particular — at a cursory glance — seems to showcase more female artists than many art blogs do (or at least, the ones I seem to find, anyway).

A few favourites:
Benedetta Bonichi [home page]
Christopher Conn Askew (especially La Penitente!) [home page]
Mari Shimizu [home page]
Richard Laillier [home page]

From Monster Brains, an awesome site for weird art, the real-unreal and beautifully executed animal paintings of Laurie Hogin (second on page). [Home page, article]

And from Pink Tentacle, the anatomy of Japanese folk monsters!

Still out of the cave. Recently I’ve been looking at outsider art, and have noticed that most of the artists to whom space and thought (at least online) have been given are — no big surprise — male. So I searched for female outsider artists, and found Aloise Corbaz, a Swiss woman who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1918 and committed to a mental hospital, where she remained for the rest of her life.

Unlike the majority of those labelled “outsider artists”, she was well educated. Her work, which she began in secret around 1920 (most of her early output was destroyed), portrays a protean, unlimited world in which her own image is prominent, in the midst of suitors, historical figures, and characters from opera; flowers abound, colours are brilliant, and the general mood seems to be one of untrammelled love, play, indulgence and delight — in a realm where everyone has big blank blue eyes, as if to signify that they are immortals, or ideational rather than corporeal beings (but one would have to ask Aloise). Sometimes the gaiety seems to take on a sinisterly desperate, Weimar cabaret sort of tone — but it’s hard to be sure whether the figures’ expressions are meant to appear crazed or simply passionate.

Cloisonné de théâtre, 1951, coloured pencil, oil pastel and thread on paper.
Photo: Philip Bernard. Source: Raw Vision

waterloo / marie stuart / werther / tosca
Source: Random Index — larger image there

Source: Ubuweb

(Valkyrie as Madonna?)
Source: Ubuweb

Her doctor, Jacqueline Porret-Forel, who along with hospital director Hans Steck, took an interest in her work, wrote:
“The world as recreated by Aloïse is cosmic and insubstantial, free of physical contingencies, in opposition to the old natural world she knew before her ‘death,’ that is before her illness. It is a supernatural world, theater of the Universe, thronged with immutable, hieratic actors whose deeds and feelings are expressed by the tiny hieroglyphic figures around them. Furthermore, their very essence is uncertain. They may be themselves and yet simultaneously represent something else. A woman may be herself and at the same time her icon … or a living lantern … or an allegory.”

The part following “furthermore” rang a solipsistic bell for me, as it could be a description of what goes on in my head. To me, it makes perfect sense that a person (certainly a person in art or fiction, and perhaps a person in everything but the bodily sense too) could be themselves, an icon, an allegory, and a living lantern. That they could be seems much more likely than that they couldn’t be.

Sources: Ubuweb (also has images — if the link doesn’t show up, it’s at the bottom left of the picture), Wikipedia, Japan Times, Raw Vision, Random Index (go to main page for vintage tattoos, strange and beautiful art, and just plain strange art).

Coming out of hole to say that Last Drink Bird Head, awesomely imaginative flash fiction for literacy, is available for pre-order:

What Is Last Drink Bird Head?

That’s the catalyst editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer provided to over 80 writers in creating this unique anthology, with all proceeds going to ProLiteracy.org. All each writer got was an email with “Last Drink Bird Head” in the subject line and the directions “Who or what is Last Drink Bird Head? Under 500 words.” The result? Last Drink Bird Head is a blues musician, a performance artist, a type of alcohol, a town in Texas, and even a song sung by girl scouts in Antarctica. Famed designer John Coulthart did the interior, which features bobbing bird heads in the corners of the pages, so that the antho is also a flipbook.

Cover image:

Order Page

As I said in my earlier post, the contributor list is awesome. Having been given permission to include teasers in this advertisement, my piece is actually 5 short pieces, one of which is a poem that starts like this:

In the land of the thundercloud
on that most open of pinion ayeways, that scraaa-aa-apes down
from Hrim Town of the iron filing cabinets, iron horses, iron heads,
longbows, curfews, depressions, down to Hum,
known for its many used Tarota dealers
(& the astonishing aerial ballétopétomachia, held every June at the Grand Opera),
the goondas’ silver trail, the high and cold
gutter down the roof of the world,
which the gamblers call Rue Misère Ouverte or Miserie op Tafel Straat,
and the shills—not a damn one that speaks except in tongues—
call the Dill’s Doodweg—passes through Last Drink Bird Head,
where the deciduous Marquis, to prove
that a white Borsalino was the real thing…

(The Marquis, Borsalino held over heart, smiles winsomely, bats a silver-sugared eyelash, and whispers that you might like to buy the book…)

* * *

While I’m out of the hole, I’m looking at artist Melli Ink. Glass skeletons, insects, savage plants…  And at the bottom of this page, the poem Blue Horse, by Masako Takiguchi.

I was going to go back in the hole and close comments off this post, but changed my mind. In case comments help sales, or the Marquis needs to say more, or something.

One of my students gave me a present — a Yoshitaka Amano weekly art calendar. She apologised for it being a 2009 calendar, but of course that matters not when it’s Amano. It has a booklet of 52 pictures, many of which were new to me. Quite a lot of them are cute and cartoonish, including several adorable ones of Vampire Hunter D in chibi style.

This is the calendar -

And here is the company that made it -

Art Vivant
- but I can’t find either this or a 2010 calendar, though I’ll check back from time to time.

The Amano section of their site has a gallery of small pictures. To see more works (on the right), click on the link below the pictures with the numeral 10 in it. There are also some small prints (or just postcards, I’m not sure, but they seem to be limited editions) of D and other subjects — some of the links show you extra pictures — but I can’t see any price or ordering information. And if you’re a diehard fan with time to kill, clicking on the top link here will open a navigable advertisement with even more pictures.

On the subject of art, on a recent look-in at Who Killed Bambi I was taken with Al Farrow’s reliquaries made of firearms and ammunition, Claire Morgan’s bird falling through a roof (or planar field) of strawberries, and Shi Jinsong’s nasty nursery furniture.

The Ningyo-do Bunko Database is an online collection of over 5000 watercolour paintings by Kawasaki Kyosen (1877-1942) of antique Japanese toys and folk craft items. (Via Pink Tentacle, which naturally enough focuses on octopus-themed works.) Click on kyosen gangucho and gangucho to go to the indexes. Each link in the indexes takes you to a book’s worth of images.

A few pictures from the collection:

Also from Pink Tentacle, tangible holograms using focused ultrasonic waves, and translucent CG flowers by illustrator Macoto Murayama. Murayama’s translucent images highlight the geometrical structure in the beauty of flowers.

And while I’m linking, from the BBC, do seals navigate by the stars?