Tag: symbolism

Robert Buratti

Robert Buratti, “The Hierophant”, Date Unknown, Ink and Pen on Paper, 15.7 x 11.8 Inches

This work is part of the Arcana Series by Robert Buratti and was inspired by “The Hierophant” card of the Thoth tarot deck. Buratti’s work is chiefly concerned with the role of the spiritual within contemporary art, and the talismanic and transformational power of the image. Influenced by the approach and experimentation of artists such as James Gleeson, Andre Breton, Aleister Crowley, Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, Buratti’s work seeks a balance between the seen and unseen, the technical and the intuitive.

James Mortimer

James Mortimer: Paintings, Oil on Linen

James Mortimer, a painter and a sculptor, was born in Swindon, Wiltshire in 1989. He was educated at a Catholic School and studied sculpture at the Bath School of Art, receiving the Kenneth Armitage Prize for Sculpture. Mortimer now devotes himself to painting imagined scenes of immoral excess, mythical creatures and larger than life characters. He is represented by the Catto Gallery on Heath Street in London.

James Mortimer’s fey boys inhabit a world of uncomplicated decadence, a surreal Renaissance landscape where man and beast exist together on increasingly equal terms. Inhibitions go out the window; each is a slave to their own nature. The ensuing relationships provide fertile ground for myriad little dramas as the companions look to get along. Animals become mischievous, even vicious at times. Their masters try to rise above it, retaining an almost Imperial sense of composure, but in the process find themselves somehow detached, lost even, gazing wistfully into the opium haze of their peculiar adopted land.

Whilst seemingly simple, there is wealth of drama playing out behind the scenes. Visual puns and innuendoes pepper his paintings like Freudian slips of the brush. Every fruit and every plant is pregnant with suggestion. Exoticism and the thrill of travel also permeate every scene, like Victorian Boy’s Own adventures that have turned slightly spicy and risqué. And underneath it all, there is a simmering sexuality. These characters are vain, vice-loving and beautiful.

Note: an Extensive collection of James Mortimer’s work can be found at: http://www.jamesmortimerart.com/paintings

art@cattogallery.co.uk

Pelle Swedlund

Pelle Swedlund, “Gripsholm”, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 96 x 83,5 cm, Private Collection

Pelle Swedlund was a Swedish painter and curator at Thiel Gallery in Stockholm. He was a pupil at the Swedish Academy (1889-92) and completed his education in Paris and Brittany, where he met Paul Gauguin and together they experimented in making woodcuts. His contact with the Nabis circle of painters lead him in 1898 to visit Bruges, a place which was to fascinate and inspire him throughout his career.

At the turn of the century, Bruges, which was known as Bruges-La-Morte following Georges Rodenbach’s novel of that title, was a cult gathering place for Symbolist and mystical painters and writers and was particularly significant for Pelle Swedlund.

Reblogged with thanks to http://ufansius.tumblr.com

Arnold Bocklin

Arnold Bocklin, “Self Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle”, 1872, Oil on Canvas, Getty Museum

The Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin studied in Germany, where he became friends with Ludwig Feuerbach, one of the most important philosophers of the 19th century. Later after thirty trips to the Italy, the artist finally decided to live there for ten years uninterruptedly. It is in Rome where Böcklin studied the classical artista and Roman mythology. This experience in Italy transformed Böcklin’s work which slowly changed to a work full of symbols, fantastic worlds and mythical creatures.

After the period in Italy, the artist traveled back to Germany and painted  “Self Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle” in 1872. Here we see the artist untidy, with a long beard and a neckless shirt. Behind him, in shadows, there is a skeleton playing a violin, a symbol used for centuries to represent Death. With a grimace, Death seems to laugh sarcastically, foreseeing the inevitable fate of the artistand us all.

Böcklin exercised an influence on Surrealist painters like Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, and on Giorgio de Chirico. Otto Weisert designed an Art Nouveau typeface in 1904 and named it “Arnold Böcklin” in his honor. Böcklin’s paintings, especially “The Isle of the Dead”, inspired several late-Romantic composers. Sergei Rachmaninoff and Heinrich Schülz-Beuthen both composed symphonic poems after it.

Elizabeth Coyne

Four Paintings by Elizabeth Coyne

Elizabeth Coyne was born in Minnesota and raised in California, Canada and Indiana. In the early 1980′s, she moved to New York where she had numerous exhibitions in the 1980′s and 1990′s. She has Masters of Fine Arts in painting from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from Purdue University. Elizabeth Coyne has also studied and lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently working on a series of paintings based on the images from her monoprints which deal with tangible and intangible realities.

‘My paintings offer contemplation into life and into possibilities of existence. For me making art is about not only seeing and looking at the world around me- but also knowing that world and absorbing it. I have developed a personal invented language of images and symbols based on the natural world. This visual language is collected from connections that I make in an ethereal way, mental images built  from the logic of the materials I work with.

This world I make in a painting, describes abstract places and relationships and it is a physical transcriptive process, where each painting is a synthesis of the  mind. An image is composed from different sources, both products of my imagination and transcriptions based on my perceptions. Painting has become a way of mapping my thoughts and experiences – a  type of private cartography. “ – Elizabeth Coyne

Stephen Cefalo

Stephen Cefalo: Paintings

Stephen Cefalo is an American artist in the traditions of Symbolism and the Baroque.  He was born in the hometown of Albrecht Durer (Nuremberg, Germany) on the birthday of three of his his heroes, Winslow Homer, Charles Le Brun, and Franz Von Stuck, and felt a calling from early childhood to become a painter.

Chris Sedgwick

Paintings by Chris Sedgwick

Inspired by the fear of death and in constant search for something that will transcend it, Chris Sedgwick is an American contemporary painter whose work mainly focuses on esotericism, occult spiritual symbolism, Cyphers, Ritual, and the Inner human condition. He began his career painting very dark color wise, highly influenced by Odd Nerdrum and Carravagio, but knew deep inside he must evolve his own style and character if he wants to be satisfied with his path and find a niche in the art world.

Gold leaf has been present since the beginning, as the artist was mainly sprinkling a little on the ground or in a circle in the composition to communicate the sacred, but at one moment he decided just to go ahead and paint fully on gold leaf. Sedgwick considers this a transition from painting the mundane world where rituals were taking place to painting the spiritual world where the rituals were meant to be effecting. Another significant transition occurred when he started using what he calls “constellation” forms and using outlines of figures against ethereal like backgrounds in the same piece that there would be a realistically painted form.

The transition to this “spiritual” plane lead him to start using glow in the dark paint and creating some works that include natural objects, such as The Last Magician, to represent a mirroring of the painting in the natural tactile world of nature by incorporating sticks and plant matter.

Fabien Mrelle

Fabien Mrelle, “Pentateuque”, Fiberglass Resin Sculpture, 2013

The work of French artist Fabien Mrelle involves creative combinations of dreams, experiences, and his early childhood imagination. He blurs the line between reality and fiction. In his biography, Mrelle states: “Following the unrolling of a dream, playing with the free association of shapes and ideas, he seems to say that everything is transforming, metamorphing, opening itself to the most diverse interpretations.”

The life-size version of Fabien Mérelle’s “Pentateuque” was exhibited in Hong Kong’s Statue Square Garden from May 21 to July 6 in 2013. Presented by Edouard Malingue Gallery, the five-meter-tall statue made of resin and fiberglass depicts an elephant balanced on the back of a man. The male figure was cast from the body of the artist himself, while the elephant is modeled after one at the Singapore zoo.

“The work brings to real life Mérelle’s imaginary world, which lies between a dream and the existent,” says Jennifer Caroline Ellis from Edouard Malingue Gallery. “It’s implausible, yet, one comes to question whether it’s conceivable.”

“Pentateuque” refers to the first five books of the bible and the sculpture humorously alludes to the human propensity for carrying the weight of the world on one’s shoulders, metaphorically bending over under the burden of religion, culture, and society’s expectations.

Hugo Simberg

Hugo Simberg, “The Wounded Angel’”, Oil on Canvas, 1903

The “Wounded Angel” is a painting by Finnish symbolist painter Hugo Simberg. It is one of the most recognizable of Simberg’s works, and was voted Finland’s “national painting” in a vote held by the Ateneum art museum in 2006.

Like other Simberg works, the atmosphere is melancholic: the angelic central figure with her bandaged forehead and bloodied wing, the sombre clothing of her two youthful bearers. The direct gaze of the right-hand figure touches the viewer.

The procession passes through a recognisable landscape, that of Eläintarha, Helsinki, with Töölönlahti Bay in the background. In Hugo Simberg’s time, the park was a popular spot for leisure-time activities among the working classes. At the time, many charity institutions were located in Eläintarha park. In “The Wounded Angel” the healthy boys are carrying the injured girl towards the Blind Girls’ School and the Home for Cripples. She clutches a bunch of snowdrops, symbolic of healing and rebirth.

Simberg himself declined to offer any deconstruction, suggesting that the viewer draw their own conclusions. However it is known that Simberg had been suffering from meningitis, and that the painting was a source of strength during his recovery. This can also be read metaphorically: meningitis is known to cause neck stiffness, lethargy and light sensitivity, each of which is exhibited by the central figure.

Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon, “A Knight”, 1885, Oil on Canvas, 53.5 x 37.5 cm, Private Collection

Odilon Redon, born in 1840 in Bordeaux, France, was a Symbolist painter, lithographer, and etcher. His work developed along two distinctive genres. His oil paintings and pastels were mostly still lifes with flowers; these gave him a reputation among Henri Matisse and other painters as an important colorist. His prints, however, were quite different, foreshadowing the Surrealist and Dadaist movements  with their exploration of fantastic, haunted, and macabre themes.

Redon studied under painter and teacher Jean-Leon Gérôme, one of the most prominent late 19th century academic artists in France. He mastered engraving under the tutelage of Rodolphe Bresdin, who was noted for his highly detailed and technically precise prints. Redon learned lithography under printmaker and illustrator Henri Fantin-Latour who became known for his group compositions of contemporary French celebrities.

Odilon Redon produced nearly two hundred prints, which included many series of multiple images. In 1879 he produced the lithograph series collectively titled “In the Dream”. a portfolio of ten lithographs. Redon dedicated a series to Edgar Allan Poe in 1882 which evoked the private torments in Poe’s life. His series “Homage to Goya” done in 1885 included imaginary winged demons and menacing shapes.

Odilon Redons’s lifework represented an exploration of his inner feelings and psyche. His source of inspiration and the force behind his work are explained by himself in his journal “To Myself”:  “I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.”

 

 

Agostino Arrivabene

Agostino Arrivabene, “Giorgio e Cief”, 2007, Oil on Wood, Dimensions Unknown, Private Collection

Born in 1967, Agostino Arrivabene is a visionary artist who paints surrealistic works. Influenced by Symbolist artists such as Gustave Moreau and Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum, his work features landscapes, portraits, and allegorical paintings often with apocalyptic themes. Arrivabene currently lives and works in a rural farmhouse In Gradella di Pandino, near Milan, Italy.

Arrivabene uses antique painting techniques to create a foundation from which metamorphic figures emerge in moments of creation. The time-consuming labor of grinding pigments and layering paints is evident in the complex, heavily textural works. In the late part of 2018, he began a new series of paintings using natural canvases , conglomerate mineral and woodland findings, to add natural textures to his surreal works.

Roberto Ferri

Roberto Ferri, “Struggle IV”, Oil on Canvas, 2013

Roberto Ferri is an Italian artist and painter from Taranto, Italy. He graduated in 1996 from the Liceo Artistico Lisippo Taranto, a local art school in Taranto. Ferri moved to Rome in 1999, to do research on ancient painting, particularly those works at the end of the 16th century. He graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome, in 2006.

His work is deeply inspired by the Baroque painters, particularly Caravagggio, and other masters of Romanticism, the Academy style, and Symbolism. Ferri’s work is represented in private collections and was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale.