Month: June 2016

Boris Olshanskiy

Artwork of Boris Olshanskiy

Boris Olshanskiy is a lesser-known painter from the turn of the 21st century who drew fantastic scenes from Slavic mythology. He has produce only several hundred works during his career as a painter.

Born on February 25, 1956 in the city of Tambov, Olshanskiy attended the Penza Art College and the Moscow State Institute of Painting of V.I. Surikov. Following his graduation, Olshanskiy began to work in graphics and illustration in Moscow, his talents as an artist were soon noticed and in 1989, he was inducted as a member of the Union of Artists of Russia.

During the beginning of the Perestroika, Olshanskiy began to take an interest in painting and soon applied his interest of the ancient Slavs and their mythology to his work. In 1993, Olshanskiy organized his first personal exhibition, displaying over 300 works, in his time, he would take part in many more exhibitions both locally and abroad.

In recent times, Olshanskiy and his works have faded into obscurity; his most recent painting being from 2006. The artist himself is very rarely heard of nowadays. Despite this, Olshanskiy’s works have shaped the way many view Slavic myths, possibly as much as artists such as Ivan Bilibin or Viktor Korolkov.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe ( November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, known for his sensitive yet blunt treatment of controversial subject-matter in the large-scale, highly stylized black and white medium of photography. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits and still-life images of flowers. His most controversial work is that of the underground BDSM scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s of New York. The homoeroticism of this work fuelled a national debate over the public funding of controversial artwork.

“Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity, and enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace. He was not looking to make a political statement or an announcement of his evolving sexual persuasion. He was presenting something new, something not seen or explored as he saw and explored it. Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism. As Cocteau said of a Genet poem, “His obscenity is never obscene.” — Patti Smith, Just Kids

Fringe Comics

Fringe Comics

Fringe Comics (Volume 1) is the first series of comic books revolving around the Fringe multiverse. They were written by Mike Johnson, Alex Katsnelson, Matthew Pitts, Danielle DiSpaltro and Kim Cavyan, with art produced by Tom Mandrake and Simon Coleby.

A set of six comic books were released in this volume, with an additional preview comic that was released at the 2008 Comic-Con.

Stanislav Szukalski

Artwork of Stanislav Szukalski

Stanisłav Szukalski  was a Polish-born painter and sculptor who became a part of the Chicago Renaissance. He also developed the pseudoscientific-historical theory of Zermatism, positing that all human culture was derived from post-deluge Easter Island and that mankind was locked in an eternal struggle with the Sons of Yeti (“Yetinsyny”), the offspring of Yeti and humans.

In 1934 the government of Poland declared Stanislav Szukalski the country’s ‘Greatest Living Artist.’ It built the Szukalski National Museum in Warsaw to hold his massive sculptures and dramatic, mythological paintings.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they destroyed the museum and all of Szukalski’s sculptures and paintings. He fled to the United States, where no one recognized him as a celebrated hero. He lived in a small apartment in Glendale, California and made a meager income drawing maps for the aerospace industry.

Szukalski would have remained in total obscurity if he hadn’t been discovered by a few popular underground cartoonists: Robert Williams, Rick Griffin, and Jim Woodring – who recognized Szukalski’s immense artistic talent, and befriended him. In 1971, Glenn Bray, a publisher who had previously specialized in the work of Mad Magazine artist Basil Wolverton, befriended him and later published one book of Szukalski’s art, Inner Portraits (1980), and another of his art and philosophy, A Trough Full of Pearls / Behold! The Protong (1982).

Charles McKay: “The Opinions That Governed Ages That Fled”

The Faces of Man: Photo Set Two

“Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds